Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/818

798 there could be no meaning. Further, if, after the axiom had been brought partially within his comprehension by an example, he were to laugh at the learned words used and propose to say instead, "shoving and back-shoving are one as strong as the other," it would possibly be held by Professor Tait that this way of putting it is hardly satisfactory. If he thought it worth while to enlighten the rustic, he might, perhaps, point out to him that his statement did not include all the facts—that not only shoving and back-shoving, but also pulling and back-pulling, are one as strong as the other. Supposing the rustic were not too conceited, he might eventually be taught that the abstract, and to him seemingly vague, formula, "action and reaction are equal and opposite," was chosen because by no words of a more specific kind could be expressed the truth in its entirety. Professor Tait, however, and Mr. Kirkman, though the physical and mathematical terms they daily employ are so highly abstract as to prove meaningless to those who are unfamiliar with the concrete facts covered by them, seem not to have drawn any general inference from this habitual experience. For, had they done so, they must have been aware that a formula expressing all orders of changes in their general course—astronomic, geologic, biologic, psychologic, sociologic—could not possibly be framed in any other than words of the highest abstractness. Perhaps there may come the rejoinder that they do not believe any such universal formula is possible. Perhaps they will say that the on-going of things, as shown in our planetary system, has nothing in common with the ongoing of things which has brought the earth's crust to its present state, and that this has nothing in common with the on-going of things which the growths and actions of living bodies show us; although, considering that the laws of molar motion and the laws of molecular action are proved to hold true of them all, it requires considerable courage to assert that the modes of coöperation of the physical forces in these several regions of phenomena present no traits in common. But, unless they allege that there is one law for the redistribution of matter and motion in the heavens, and another law for the redistribution of matter and motion in the earth's inorganic masses, and another law for its organic masses—unless they assert that the transformation everywhere in progress follows here one method and there another—they must admit that the proposition which expresses the general course of the transformation can do it only in terms remote in the extremest degree from words suggesting definite objects and actions.

After noting the unconsciousness thus betrayed by Mr. Kirkman and Professor Tait, that the expression of highly abstract truths necessitates highly abstract words, we may go on to note a scarcely less remarkable anomaly of thought shown by them. Mr. Kirkman appears to think, and Professor Tait apparently agrees with him in thinking, that when one of these abstract words, coined from Greek or Latin roots, is transformed into an uncouth-looking combination of