The next term in the series of social institutions is the school, inclusive of its higher departments. But for reasons which will sufficiently appear to anyone who carefully reads this chapter, it is advisable to treat the vocations first.  
A more ludicrous mistake cannot be conceived than that of taking the ideal for the fact, the wish for the deed, in matters touching the social institutions. Thus the term “vocational guidance” is often used, as if the occupations of the majority of men already answered to what is implied in the idea of a vocation as if, for instance, industrial labor in a factory were a “vocation” into which the young only needed to be guided, whereas guidance means, in this case, being directed into some mechanical occupation not already overcrowded, or turned into other unvocational occupations when they happen not to be over-filled. But what is true of monotonous, mechanical labor in factories is true in a greater or less degree of all human occupations. None of them at least are as yet vocations in the highest sense.
 
I dwell on this because, in describing the vocation as the third term in the series, I would not have the reader imagine that this third term exists in any adequate manner. Rather is it to be the task of what is often loosely261 called “social reform” to create the ethical series,—not only the third term (the vocation), but the whole series from beginning to end, the family, the school, the state, the international society, the ideal religious society. The phrase “social reform” is strictly correct only when used comprehensively in this way. To confine its usage to the more equable repartition of wealth, or to changes in economic conditions is unwarrantably to narrow its signification. Social reform is the reformation of all the social institutions in such a way that they may become successive phases through which the individual shall advance towards the acquisition of an ethical personality.
 
In sketching the ideals of the different vocations, I have to consider in what way each contributes to the formation of an ethical personality. There is an empirical side to each vocation. Every vocation satisfies some one or more of the empirical human needs; but in the very act or process of doing so, it ought, in order to deserve the name of a vocation, to satisfy also a spiritual need, to contribute in a specific way toward the formation of a spiritual personality.74 Agriculture furnishes food. The different trades minister to a great variety of wants. The scientist extends our knowledge of nature. With this empirical aspect of the vocations, however, I am not here concerned. A scientific classification of the vocations is not a task to which I need address myself. My task is an ethical classification of the vocations.262 As this has never been undertaken, the first attempt is difficult and perforce provisional.
 
I outline my topics as follows:
 
1. The theoretical physical sciences (including mathematics) considered from the point of view of the specific way in which the ethical personality may be developed by those who pursue them.
 
2. The practical counterparts of the theoretical sciences, e.g., engineering, and the industrial arts in so far as they depend on and illustrate and use principles and methods furnished by science. Work in factories, mines, and also in the fields, is to be regarded as the executive side of theoretical science.
 
3. The historical sciences, those which have to do with mentally reproducing the life of the human race in the past, including history proper, philology, arch?ology, etc.
 
4. The vocation of the artist.
 
5. The vocation of the lawyer and the judge.
The vocation of the statesman.
The vocation of the religious teacher.
 
The three last mentioned are classed together as educational vocations, that is, as vocations which, in respect to their highest significance, are branches of the pedagogy of mankind, having for their object to educate the human race; the ethical object of the lawyer being to educate society in the idea of justice; of the statesman to educate society in the idea of the state; of the religious teacher to educate society in the idea of the spiritual universe.
 
This conception of the lawyer, the politician, etc., as263 primarily educators, is a point to which particular attention is directed. The significance of it will appear further on. I shall now indicate in bare outline what I conceive to be the specific contribution of the vocations mentioned to the formation of a spiritual personality.
 
Science
 
Conspicuously important in this connection is the question whether and by what means the pursuit of the physical sciences can be linked up to the supreme spiritual end of man. The scientist may develop into a great thinker in the course of comprehensive and intricate investigations, but he does not thereby necessarily develop into a personality. His mind will become in this way a mirror of the orderly procession of nature’s phenomena. He will be the accurate recorder of what happens, the knowing spectator of the play, whose eye recognizes the actors, the forces, beneath their disguises. The pursuit of knowledge of this kind for the sake of knowledge, or it may be for the sake of exercising the faculty of cognition, represents the purely scientific conception of the aim of science. Whatever moral qualities are exacted of the scientist, such as accuracy or intellectual veracity, self-abnegation, scorn of mere vulgar pecuniary reward or celebrity, and at least a provisional disregard of the practical benefits to be derived by mankind from scientific discovery—all these fine traits of character are prized as subordinate to the strictly scientific object. The ethical character of the man himself is not regarded as the supreme end to be fostered by his264 scientific occupation, but as instrumental to his occupation the aims of which are said to be purely impersonal.
 
There is thus a scientific conception of the aim of science; on the other hand, there is an ethical conception of it. The former points in the direction of the indefinite extension of knowledge which never embraces a totality of the knowable, never reaches a limit, even in idea. The latter points to the infinite, not to the indefinite, sets up an ideal of the infinite as the goal, takes the man out of the flux, centralizes his individuality into a personality by relating him to the infinite, not as the mere spectator and scribe of nature, but through his action or other potential spiritual beings like himself.
 
The scientist, in brief, like every one else, becomes a personality by eliciting the potential spiritual nature in other human beings. But be it noted that he is to perform this task as a scientist. His particular occupation is to be the means of producing a particular spiritual result in others as well as in himself, and by this means his occupation is to be converted into a vocation.
 
How? Through partial success and frustration. Partial success in the case of a scientist means for one thing, increased mental grasp, the power to hold before the mind ever more and more complex relations,—a faculty supremely serviceable in mastering complexities of relation in the economic, in the political spheres, in the sphere of international intercourse, in the sphere of the social relations in general, and wherever the ethical principle has to be applied. The scientific occupation trains powers which are to be exercised so as to illuminate obscurities in the ethical field.
 
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The frustration which the scientist meets w............