Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/821

Rh ashamed to quote it to readers who may have come fresh from the last number of the 'North American Review,' and from the great sentence there quoted as summing up Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory of evolution, 'Evolution is, etc' Homer's poor little saying comes not in such formidable shape. It is only this: ''Wide is the range of words! words may make this way or that way.''" And then he proceeds with his reflections upon German logomachies. All of which makes it manifest that, going out of his way, as he does, to quote this formula from the "North American Review," he intends tacitly to indicate his agreement in the reviewer's estimate of it.

That these two men of letters, like the two mathematicians, are unable to frame ideas answering to the words in which evolution at large is expressed, seems manifest. In all four, the verbal symbols used call up either no images, or images of the vaguest kinds, which, grouped together, form but the most shadowy thoughts. If, now, we ask what is the common trait in the education and pursuits of all four, we see it to be lack of familiarity with those complex processes of change which the concrete sciences bring before us. The men of letters, in their early days dieted on grammars and lexicons, and in their later days occupied with belles-lettres, biography, and a history made up mainly of personalities, are by their education and course of life left almost without scientific ideas of a definite kind. The universality of physical causation, the interpretation of all things in terms of a never-ceasing redistribution of matter and motion, is naturally to them an idea utterly alien. The mathematician, too, and the mathematical physicist, occupied exclusively with the phenomena of number, space and time, or, in dealing with forces, dealing with them in the abstract, carry on their researches in such ways as may, and often do, leave them quite unconscious of the traits exhibited by the general transformations which things, individually and in their totality, undergo. In a chapter on "Discipline," in the "Study of Sociology," I have commented upon the uses of the several groups of sciences—abstract, abstract-concrete, and concrete—in cultivating different powers of mind; and have argued that while, for complete preparation, the discipline of each group of sciences is indispensable, the discipline of any one group alone, or any two groups, leaves certain defects of judgment. Especially have I contrasted the analytical habit of thought which study of the abstract and abstract-concrete sciences produces with the synthetical habit of thought produced by study of the concrete sciences. And I have exemplified the defects of judgment to which the analytical habit, unqualified by the synthetical habit, leads. Here we meet with a striking illustration. Scientific culture of the analytical kind, almost as much as absence of scientific culture, leaves the mind bare of those ideas with which the concrete sciences deal. Exclusive familiarity with the forms and factors of phenomena no more fits men for dealing with the products in their totalities than does mere literary study.