SPECULATIVE SCIENCE. 151 



in the nebular regions, when they ought to be fighting and grubbing 

 on the solid ground below. In course of time these individuals, de- 

 spite the utter fatuity of their undertaking, persuaded themselves that 

 they were engaged in something important, and became noisy and pre- 

 sumptuous. At one time they even clamored for admission into the 

 ranks of the physicists and astronomers, on the ground that they had 

 discovered phonetic and other laws, which they claimed to be as im- 

 mutable as the laws of Kepler. Their application was, of course, 

 scornfully denied, for the reason that they were either no scientists at 

 all, or at best speculative scientists. Instead of submitting humbly 

 to this just decree of the physicists (it is a pity they had not my pres- 

 ent meekness before them as an example), these men grew wrathy and 

 turned away with something like this objurgation : " Well, never mind, 

 the time is not far distant when you will come as suppliants to us." 

 And, thereupon, in sheer malice, having got well-nigh through with 

 the roots and branches of words, they fell to attacking the history of 

 their meanings of concepts, as they called them pretending to make 

 legitimate employment of inductive methods, which they wholly mis- 

 apprehended, no doubt, and which, at any rate, were among the clear 

 prerogatives of the physicists. And now they pretend to have estab- 

 lished, inductively, a number of laws relating to the operations of the 

 intellect, which they again assert to be immutable, and, though con- 

 trolling acts of consciousness, to be wholly independent of deliberate 

 intent or set purpose. They say, for instance, that there runs through- 

 out the history of speculative as well as of ordinary thinking an 

 almost irrepressible tendency to hypostasize concepts, or (as I have 

 called it, cribbing an outrageous barbarism from Professor Bain) to 

 reify them. I will try to explain to you what that means, as nearly as 

 possible in your own words. When people make or find a new " ab- 

 stract noun," they instantly try to put it on a shelf or into a box, as 

 though it were a thing ; thus they reify it. In very early times they 

 did worse than that they undertook to incase it in a smock-frock or 

 a pair of breeches. They personified it. There was a still earlier 

 period when, worst of all, men blasphemously and impiously deified 

 abstractions ; and it is said that this class of persons has not wholly 

 died out yet. 



Now, the silly speculators I have just alluded to have already di- 

 vided the science they pretend to be cultivating into several branches, 

 to which, being word-mongers, they give all sorts of sesquipedalian 

 names, such as comparative linguistics, comparative psychology, com- 

 parative mythology, and so forth. To give you an idea of the temer- 

 ity of these pseudo-scientists, let me tell you that one of them, Professor 

 Max Miiller, of Oxford who is, of course, a German at one time 

 undertook to account for the monotheism of the Jewish race by a 

 peculiarity of Semitic speech. It is even whispered that he and others, 

 years ago, evolved $he whole city of Troy, with all its houses and 



