APPENDIX. 579 



expressed the truth in its entirety. Professor Tait however, 

 and Mr. Kirkman, though the physical and mathematical 

 terms they daily employ are so highly abstract as to prove 

 meaningless to those who are unfamiliar with the concrete 

 facts covered by them, seem not to have drawn any general 

 inference from this habitual experience. For had they done 

 so, they must have, been aware that a formula expressing all 

 orders of changes in their general course — astronomic, geo- 

 logic, biologic, psychologic, sociologic — could not possibly be 

 framed in any other than words of the highest abstractness. 

 Perhaps there may come the rejoinder that they do not believe 

 any such universal formula is possible. Perhaps they will 

 say that the on-going of things as shown in our planetary sys- 

 tem, has nothing in common with the on-going of things 

 which has brought the Earth's crust to its present state, and 

 that this has nothing in common with the on-going of things 

 which the growths and actions of living bodies show us; al- 

 though, considering that the laws of molar motion and the 

 laws of molecular action are proved to hold true of them all, 

 it requires considerable courage to assert that the modes of 

 co-operation of the physical forces in these several regions of 

 phenomena, present no traits in common. But unless they 

 allege that there is one law for the redistribution of matter and 

 motion in the heavens, and another law for the redistribution 

 of matter and motion in the Earth's inorganic masses, and 

 another law for its organic masses — unless they assert that the 

 transformation everywhere in progress follows here one meth- 

 od and there another; they must admit that the proposition 

 which expresses the general course of the transformation can 

 do it only in terms remote in the extremest degree from words 

 suggesting definite objects and actions. 



After noting the unconsciousness thus betrayed by Mr. 

 Kirkman and Professor Tait, that the expression of highly 

 abstract truths necessitates highly abstract words, we may go 

 on to note a scarcely less remarkable anomaly of thought 

 shown by them. Mr. Kirkman appears to think, and Professor 

 Tait apparently agrees with him in thinking, that when one 

 of these abstract words coined from Greek or Latin roots, is 

 transformed into an uncouth-looking combination of equiva- 

 lents of Saxon, or rather old English, origin, what they regard 

 as its misleading glamour is thereby dissipated and its mean- 

 inglessness made manifest. We may conveniently observe the 

 nature of Mr. Kirkman's belief, by listening to an imaginary 



