762 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



which Galvanus and Volta made upon the frogs as perfectly idle and 

 useless. These men of science with a wholly disinterested curiosity 

 ardently pursued their researches. It is from these little experiments, 

 more or less then a plaything for the idle hours, that all our electrical 

 industries with their innumerable practical consequences have sprung. 



To many pragmatists science is only a nominal thing; the scientist 

 creates the fact through experiment; then he denatures the rough 

 facts, transforming them into "scientific facts." Poincare replies, 

 showing that "all a scientist creates in the fact is the language by 

 which he expresses it." If some day we find that the statement of a 

 physical law is incomplete or ambiguous, we have merely to change 

 the language by which it was expressed. Because the language by 

 which each one expresses the deeds of daily life is not free from ambi- 

 guity, should we conclude that these happenings of daily life are 

 only the work of grammarians ? 



Finally, and this is the culminating point, the pragmatists con- 

 sider science an artificial creation, contmgent, uncertain, and teach- 

 ing us nothing of objective reality. Has not Poincare shown, indeed, 

 that the mathematical sciences are contingent and that physical 

 theories express only the relations between things and not the objects 

 themselves? But here Poinare caUs, "Halt, there!" He shows that 

 the only objective reality is precisely these relations between things. 



The first condition of the objectivity to us of exterior objects is 

 that they are common to other thinking beings, which fact we may 

 know by comparing their impressions with our own. Perhaps, in my 

 opinion, Poincare goes a little too far when he affirms that this 

 guarantees the existence of the exterior world, that this suffices to 

 distinguish the real from a dream. We could, indeed, imagine our 

 whole life a dream, with beings similar to ourselves telling us of sen- 

 sations analogous to our o^vn in regard to objects, so that the fiction 

 of our dream seemed outside of ourselves. But this is not the place 

 to discuss the reality of the exterior world, since its existence is pos- 

 tulated both in the scientific and in the opposmg theories. The 

 existence of what we call the external world being placed beyond 

 doubt both by the scientists and by the pragmatists, it results clearly 

 from what has just been said that since it is through "discourse," 

 language, that men exchange sensations, there is no objectivity with- 

 out "discourse." Discourse which, according to certain nominalists 

 creates nonexistent facts and is a veil before objectivity, becomes, 

 on the contrary, its necessary condition. But, on the other hand, 

 "the sensations of others are for us an eternally closed world." I 

 shall never know whether the color sensation produced upon me by a 

 bluet and by the first and third stripes of the French flag are the 

 same as yours. All that I know is that, with you as with me, the 

 bluet and these stripes produce a similar sensation which we call 



