18 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



so ably treated in simple language by Clifford,^ 

 Poincare^ and Hobson.® Clifford's book, al- 

 though published over thirty years ago, still 

 seems to me so admirable that I have taken it, 

 more than any other work, as my model in, the 

 present chapters. 



With respect to these operations of arithme- 

 tic I do wish to say here what cannot be said too 

 often, that as a science becomes more abstract, 

 more removed from the empirical observations 

 out of which it sprang, it becomes less and less 

 profitable to inquire whether it is true. This is 

 no splitting of hairs. Regardless of what we 

 may think about absolute truth, no one can 

 question the convenience of the words "truth" 

 and "reality." Many of our ideas are so little 

 likely to be questioned that we file them away 

 in order to leave our desk clear for the very 

 doubtful questions which are constantly aris- 

 ing, although there is no knowing when we may 

 be obliged to take any of these ideas out of our 

 file for further scrutiny. 



A palaeontologist finds a fossil bone and con- 

 cludes that it belongs to some member of the 



fi Clifford, The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences. 



7 Poincar^, Science and Hypothesis. 



8 Hobson, The Domain of Natural Science. 



