TENDENCIES OF MODERN PHYSICS 59 



Lorentz say he has kept in the certain path because he 

 has warned us in the beginning of his treatise that he 

 is dealing with glittering hypothesis. He takes all the 

 force out of the warning by using his genius to overlay 

 his speculations with a specious appearance of reality. 

 Let him try the opposite plan and actually convince a 

 class of students and educated men generally that his 

 hypothesis does not, and cannot, give any real insight 

 into the actual properties of matter, that he is talking in 

 a Pickwickian sense, and how much serious attention 

 would he attract? No, the world still believes in the 

 restraint of men of science and in their boast that they 

 will submit our vague longings to the test of experi- 

 ence. And it will be a bad day for science if this 

 belief is destroyed. 



Nor is it proper to adopt an attitude of indifference 

 to these hypotheses as many experimentalists do, to 

 pass them by with a shrug or with the statement that 

 they cause little harm to the growth of science, how- 

 ever little they may aid it. If science were merely a 

 mental gymnastics, this indifference would be well 

 enough, but science is increasingly considered to be a 

 guide to conduct. We have no right to approve the 

 intellectual carelessness which has been so vividly ex- 

 pressed by M. Poincare in the preface to his Theorie 

 de la Lumttre: " It matters little to us whether the 

 ether really exists; that is the business of the meta- 

 physician to find out ; the essential thing for us is that 



