hand, a distinguishing aspect of the new learning, when viewed in comparison
to its antecedents, was greater attentiveness to the historical character of all
knowledge.^40
These points merit elaboration. Like Max Weber in‘Science as a Vocation’,
Döllinger recognizes that one of the novel features of the modern university
was its commitment to a dynamic understanding of knowledge; knowledge
was not static, capable of simple transmission from one generation to the next;
it was increasing, progressing, evolving. What is more, it was in the grip of
specialization; as more domains of knowledge came into existence, an im-
perative arose to mark off separate‘fields’of study for more precise examin-
ation. Knowledge, in short, was both expanding and specializing; in a word, it
was dynamic. But unlike Weber, Döllinger, at once Catholic and attuned to
humanist concerns, was not inclined to regard this expansion as bereft of value
and telos. Rather, he conceives of the knowledge formations of his day in
profoundly holistic, organicist terms. All the knowledge born and nourished
in the university, as he puts it, works together to form a‘living organic whole’.
‘The progress of each science’, he elaborates,
is connected by a thousand threads with the development and success of the rest,
since all are bound together into a living organic whole, it follows that if one
member suffers, the whole body, and consequently every other member, suffers
with it....This may help us understand the true value of the German universities
and their peculiar function, which cannot be performed in any other way. In them
every branch of knowledge, every teaching, is elevated into the atmosphere of
science, and as science is communicated to the pupil. And this elevation can only
be accomplished by banishing all fragmentary knowledge, all of which does not
rest upon a principle, which does not embody an idea. Only thus can the
necessary and causal connection between isolated facts and theories, their pos-
ition as members of an organic whole, be brought to light.^41Furthermore, the scholarly enterprise was not just about present configur-
ations of knowledge according to Döllinger; it was also about the relationship
of present configurations to past ones. TrueWissenschaftstrove for the future,
even as it did not—and could not in order to be true to itself—forget the past.
Put differently, both scholars and students ought to feel a kinship not only
with their peers in the present, but also with their like in the past. The dead
and the living are irrevocably tied in a common pursuit to refine and extend
human knowledge. The best teacher is able to illustrate this in his pedagogy.
According to Döllinger, such a teacher is capable of‘bring[ing] before his
audience the entire genetic process (den ganzen genetischen Proceß) that his
field (Fach) has gone through, before attaining its present state—the epochs in
(^40) Universitäten, 26, 37. (^41) Universitäten,26;Universities,21–2 (translation modified).
232 Thomas Albert Howard