CRITICISMS CORRECTED. 797 



in dispelling " the widespread ignorance as to some of tlie most im- 

 portant elementary principles of physics," whether his audience went 

 away with clear ideas of the " much-abused and misunderstood term " 

 force, the report does not tell us. 



Let us pass now from these illustration of Professor Tait's judg- 

 ment, as exhibited in his special department, to the consideration of 

 his judgment on a wider question here before us the formula of evo- 

 lution. In " Nature," for July 17, 1879, while reviewing Sir Edmund 

 Beckett's " Origin of the Laws of Nature," and praising it, he says of 

 the author : " He follows, in fact, in his own way, the hint given by 

 a great mathematician (Kirkman), who made the following exquisite 

 translation of a well-known definition : ' Evolution is a change from an 

 indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, 

 through continuous differentiations and integrations.'* [Translation 

 into plain English /] Evolution is a change from a nohowish, untalk- 

 aboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in-general-talkaboutable 

 not-all alikeness, by continuous somethingelseifications and stickto- 

 getherations." 



Professor Tait, proceeding then to quote from Sir Edmund Beck- 

 ett's book passages in which, as he thinks, there is a kindred tearing 

 off of disguises from the expressions used by other authors, winds up 

 by saying " When the purposely vague statements of the materialists 

 and agnostics are thus stripped of the tinsel of high-flown and unintel- 

 ligible language, the eyes of the thoughtless who have accepted them 

 on authority (!) are at last opened, and they are ready to exclaim with 

 Titania, methinks, ' I was enamored of an ass.' " And that Mr. Kirk- 

 man similarly believes that his travesty proves the formula of evolution 

 to be meaningless, is shown by the sentence which follows it : " Can 

 any man show that my translation is unfair?" 



One would have thought that Mr. Kirkman and Professor Tait, 

 however narrowly they limited themselves to their special lines of 

 inquiry, could hardly have avoided observing that in proportion as 

 scientific terms express wider generalities, they necessarily lose that 

 vividness of suggestion which words of concrete meanings have ; and, 

 therefore, to the uninitiated seem vague, or even empty. If Professor 

 Tait enunciated to a rustic the physical axiom, " action and reaction 

 are equal and opposite," the rustic might, not improbably, fail to form 

 any corresponding idea. And he might, if his self-confidence were 

 akin to that of Mr. Kirkman, conclude that where he saw no meaning 



* A conscientious critic usually consults the latest edition of the work he criticises, 

 so that the author may have the benefit of any corrections or alterations he has made. 

 Apparently, Mr. Kirkman does not think such a precaution needful. Publishing, in 18*76, 

 his " Philosophy without Assumptions," from which the above passage is taken, he quotes 

 from the first edition of "First Principles," published in 1862; though in the edition of 

 186*7, and all subsequent ones, the definition is, in expression, considerably modified 

 two of the leading words being no longer used. 



