Haeding. — Certain Decimal and Metrical Fallacies. 85 



Art. VII. — On certain Decimal and Metrical Fallacies. 



By E. CouPLAND Harding. 



[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 5th August and 



7th October, 1903.] 



If there be one quality more than another that distinguishes 

 the scientific from the unscientific rnind it might well be 

 defined as the ability, or, perhaps more coiTectly, the habit, 

 of discriminating clearly between the symbol and the thinf^ 

 signified. Symbols, indispensable though they be, are always 

 more or less defective representives of truth, and are full of 

 danger, when, instead of servants, they become masters and 

 dominate the thoughts of men. They give rise to a mul- 

 titudinous brood of fallacies, and fallacies as they gradually 

 develop ripen into positive evil. In theology the exaltation 

 of the symbol becomes idolatry, with intellectual darkness, 

 moral corruption, and spiritual death : in science it may be 

 found elevating the latest convenient working-hypothesis 

 into an established law of nature, when that which was at 

 one time helpful becomes injurious. Truths appeal to the 

 higher intellectual faculties, and can be appreciated only by 

 application and study ; symbols may be memorised by "rote 

 and acquired with slight trouble — they are nothing more than 

 counters, though only too easily mistaken for genuine cur- 

 rency. Truths grow by accretion ; symbols remain un- 

 changed, and when outgrown they are a check on progress. 

 Of this fact schemes of notation afford sufficient proof. Our 

 English tongue, the world-language of the future, is cruelly 

 hampered in its conquering course by a defective notation — 

 not only inadequate, but the type of all that is etymologically 

 and phonetically misleading. A thousand years ago our 

 Saxon ancestors had something like a scientific and con- 

 sistent orthography — a living system, adapted to its purpose. 

 To-day we find a living language imprisoned in a dead 

 alphabet. The symbol is outgrown. Musical notation affords 

 another, though less extreme, instance. A very slight chancre 

 would convert a system at present perplexing and incon- 

 sistent into one consistent and helpful ; but again progress 

 is fettered by the outworn symbol. Our arithmetical nota- 

 tion, happily, is free from the absurdities attaching to musical 

 and orthographic notation. If, for example, the symbol 5 

 might under certain arbitrary rules signify the same as 32, 

 41, or 55, if it was sometimes to be read as 7, and occasion- 

 ally, being " silent," had to be ignored altogether — if tlie in- 

 terpolation of another symbol having sometimes a ne^^ative 

 and sometimes a positive value made it equal to 6 — then our: 



