Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/817

Rh in dispelling "the widespread ignorance as to some of the most important elementary principles of physics," whether his audience went away with clear ideas of the "much-abused and misunderstood term" force, the report does not tell us.

Let us pass now from these illustration of Professor Tait's judgment, as exhibited in his special department, to the consideration of his judgment on a wider question here before us—the formula of evolution. In "Nature," for July 17, 1879, while reviewing Sir Edmund Beckett's "Origin of the Laws of Nature," and praising it, he says of the author: "He follows, in fact, in his own way, the hint given by a great mathematician (Kirkman), who made the following exquisite translation of a well-known definition: 'Evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations.' [Translation into plain English:] Evolution is a change from a nohowish, untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in-general-talkaboutable not-all alikeness, by continuous somethingelseifications and sticktogetherations."

Professor Tait, proceeding then to quote from Sir Edmund Beckett's book passages in which, as he thinks, there is a kindred tearing off of disguises from the expressions used by other authors, winds up by saying—"When the purposely vague statements of the materialists and agnostics are thus stripped of the tinsel of high-flown and unintelligible language, the eyes of the thoughtless who have accepted them on authority (!) are at last opened, and they are ready to exclaim with Titania, methinks, 'I was enamored of an ass.'" And that Mr. Kirkman similarly believes that his travesty proves the formula of evolution to be meaningless, is shown by the sentence which follows it: "Can any man show that my translation is unfair?"

One would have thought that Mr. Kirkman and Professor Tait, however narrowly they limited themselves to their special lines of inquiry, could hardly have avoided observing that in proportion as scientific terms express wider generalities, they necessarily lose that vividness of suggestion which words of concrete meanings have; and, therefore, to the uninitiated seem vague, or even empty. If Professor Tait enunciated to a rustic the physical axiom, "action and reaction are equal and opposite," the rustic might, not improbably, fail to form any corresponding idea. And he might, if his self-confidence were akin to that of Mr. Kirkman, conclude that where he saw no meaning