578 APPENDIX. 



Professor Tait, proceeding then to quote from Sir Edmund 

 Beckett's book passages in which, as he thinks, there is a kin- 

 dred tearing off of disguises from the expressions used by other 

 authors, winds up by saying — " When the purposely vague 

 statements of the materialists and agnostics are thus stripped 

 of the tinsel of high-flown and unintelligible language, the 

 eyes of the thoughtless who have accepted them on author- 

 ity (!) are at last opened, and they are ready to exclaim with 

 Titania, methinks ' I was enamoured of an ass.' " And that 

 Mr. Kirkman similarly believes that his travesty proves the 

 formula of Evolution to be meaningless, is shown by the sen- 

 tence which follows it — " Can. any man show that my trans- 

 lation is unfair? " 



One would have thought that Mr. Kirkman and Professor 

 Tait, however narrowly they limited themselves to their special 

 lines of inquiry, could hardly have avoided observing that in 

 j)roportion as scientific terms express wider generalities, they 

 necessarily lose that vividness of suggestion which words of 

 concrete meanings have; and therefore to the unitiated seem 

 vague, or even empty. If Professor Tait enunciated to a 

 rustic the physical axiom, " action and reaction are equal and 

 opposite," the rustic might not improbably fail to form any 

 corresponding idea. And he might, if his self-confidence were 

 akin to that of Mr. Kirkman, conclude that where he saw no 

 meaning there could be no meaning. Further, if, after the 

 axiom had been brought partially within his comprehension 

 by an example, he were to laugh at the learned words used 

 and propose to say instead — " shoving and back-shoving are 

 one as strong as the other; " it would possibly be held by Pro- 

 fessor Tait that this way of putting it is hardly satisfactory. 

 If he thought it worth while to enlighten the rustic, he might 

 perhaps point out to him that his statement did not include 

 all the facts — that not only shoving and back-shoving, but 

 also pulling and back-pulling, are one as strong as the other. 

 Supposing the rustic were not too conceited, he might event- 

 ually be taught that the abstract, and to him seemingly vague, 

 formula "action and reaction are equal and opposite," was 

 chosen because by no words of a more specific kind could be 



such a precaution needful. Publishing in 1876 his Philosophy without 

 Assumptions, from which the above passage is taken, he quotes from the 

 first edition of First Principles published in 1862: though in the edition 

 of 1867, and all subsequent ones, the definition is, in expression, consider- 

 ably modified — two of the leading words being no longer used. 



