Page:Science and the Modern World.djvu/50

 author does say, but with what he does not say. Also it is not with what he knows he has assumed, but with what he has unconsciously assumed. We do not doubt the author's honesty. It is his perspicacity which we are criticising. Each generation criticises the unconscious assumptions made by its parents. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.

The history of the development of language illustrates this point. It is a history of the progressive analysis of ideas. Latin and Greek were inflected languages. This means that they express an unanalyzed complex of ideas by the mere modification of a word; whereas in English, for example, we use prepositions and auxiliary verbs to drag into the open the whole bundle of ideas involved. For certain forms of literary art, — though not always — the compact absorption of auxiliary ideas into the main word may be an advantage. But in a language such as English there is the overwhelming gain in explicitness. This increased explicitness is a more complete exhibition of the various abstractions involved in the complex idea which is the meaning of the sentence.

By comparison with language, we can now see what is the function in thought which is performed by pure mathematics. It is a resolute attempt to go the whole way in the direction of complete analysis, so as to separate the elements of mere matter of fact from the purely abstract conditions which they exemplify.

The habit of such analysis enlightens every act of the functioning of the human mind. It first (by isolating it) emphasizes the direct aesthetic appreciation of the content of experience. This direct appreciation means an apprehension of what this experience is in