What we Mean by Science. 487 



doubt useful, but, to offer it as affording any just idea of 

 science, is little better than a caricature. The time has 

 come when this noble term should be redeemed from these 

 degrading associations, and made to stand for the larger 

 and higher things which it now truly represents. Science 

 is not the peculiar property of a few curious persons, who 

 spend their days in watching bugs, or their nights in watch- 

 ing the stars. It is something, on the contrary, which be- 

 longs to the mind itself ; which pertains to our very modes 

 of thinking, and therefore concerns everybody. It is some- 

 thing to be used in reading, conversation, and business, at 

 home and in the street, week days and Sundays, in school^ 

 at the lecture, and the political gathering. Let us see how 

 this is. 



The literal meaning of the term science is to know. 

 But it has been found that there are two kinds of knowing: 

 we may know a subject loosely and vaguely, or with clear- 

 ness and precision. So important has this distinction now 

 become, that it is necessary to mark it in language, and so 

 the word science has come to be applied to one of those 

 kinds of knowledge ; it means, to know accurately. In the 

 course of time and experience, knowledge slowly passes 

 from the indefinite to the definite, from the vague to the 

 precise. This change is of the nature of a growth, and 

 hence, in its quality, science may be defined as the higher or 

 more perfect stage of developing knowledge. 



For example, men, in the rudest ages, observed that the 

 days were longer in summer than in winter, and that there 

 was a constancy in the relative position and a regularity in 

 the movements of the stars : this was the dim beginning of 

 a knowledge which has grown at length into the splendid 

 science of astronomy. So it was known to everybody that 

 fuel disappears in combustion, and that stones are altered 

 by fire ; and these vague notions have been, in time, un- 

 folded into the science of chemistry. In like manner, it 



