CRITICISMS CORRECTED. 80 1 



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 for- 

 midable 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 re- 

 flections 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 agree- 

 ment 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 let- 

 ters, 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 transfor- 

 mations which things, individually and in their totality, undergo. In 

 a chapter on " Discipline," in the " Study of Sociology," I have com- 

 mented upon the uses of the several groups of sciences abstract, ab- 

 stract-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 sci- 

 ences. 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 fa- 

 miliarity with the forms and factors of phenomena no more fits men for 

 dealing with the iiroducts in their totalities than does mere literary study. 

 vol. xvii. 45 



