Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/384

372 undivided, ability to hear sounds at a longer range grows somewhat. Noise acts as an irritant in these cases instead of aiding as in deafness due to disease.

With speech and speech-reading attained, and perhaps the happy addition of some perception of sound, the deaf need not be thrown together as a class distinct from others. They may and do receive instruction in common with their hearing friends, attending leading schools and entering professional duties side by side with them. Such persons have been charged with an unwillingness to associate with the other deaf. Lack of interest in their welfare we do not believe possible, but a preference for the companionship of the hearing proves the existence of a satisfying method of communication. All are easily influenced by surroundings, and if deprived of any particular sense, especially so. The deaf need every advantage possible, and not the least of them should be adjudged daily intercourse with the most evenly balanced characters, persons possessing a normal development of all the senses.



HE logical processes involved in scientific reasoning are the same in kind as those used in the everyday life of the masses. The difference between the two lies in the clearer recognition of the processes and their importance in the scientific field. There is nothing like exactness in the applied logic of everyday life, and the reasoning of science is superior to the "common sense" of mankind only in being more exact. In science the comparatively little work that survives and does not have to be done over and over owes its superiority to this same exactness. Science has no peculiar method of its own either of discovering facts or of treating them.

Scientific students spend little time on the consideration of logical processes, because the mind follows them instinctively; and the study of them, for practical purposes, seems to be superfluous. But apart from the fact that they present a set of phenomena as worthy of scientific treatment as the phenomena of light or of the molluscan nervous system, it is important to consider them because of their direct bearing on every department of science. Even the best established sciences have reached their present states by successive approximations toward exactness, by the gradual elimination of errors of both fact and method; and even the novice knows that the degree of confidence placed in the statements of fact of a 