12 INTEENATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



is in these quarters that the movement for the introduction 

 of an international auxiliary language receives the greatest 

 support. To this must he added the fact that, as Ostwald 

 has aptly remarked, the scientific investigator regards 

 language only as a means of making himself understood. 

 Language is not for him something " which thinks and 

 poetises," but rather an instrument for conveying his know- 

 ledge and wishes to other people, much after the fashion 

 whereby the musician is enabled to convey his feelings by 

 means of musical notation and the instruments of the 

 orchestra. The question of the suitability of a language is 

 important in this connection ; and so it does not appear so 

 very strange that it is just the scientific investigators, 

 technologists, and philosophers who have never been quite 

 satisfied with living or dead languages. How otherwise can 

 we explain the fact that it is just they who are constantly 

 solving philological problems and constantly occupied with 

 the invention not only of new signs and symbols (mathe- 

 matical, chemical, crystallographic), but also new words? 

 The fact is that science, philosophy, and technology are 

 constantly waging a fierce battle with existing languages. 

 What they want is a language as simple and clear as the 

 fundamental laws of nature, as logical as the precision of 

 experiment, and as many-sided as the complexity of the 

 facts which it has to describe. And so they are constantly 

 working at the creation of this language, all the words 

 invented by science finding their way unceasingly through 

 the channels of technology into the general vocabulary. 

 These words possess the special property of being inter- 

 national, that is to say, understood by all civilised 

 nations, including the Japanese. We do not wish, however, 

 to stop at this stage of development ; we wish to be able to 

 internationalise not only single ideas, but also the whole 

 train of thought. For this purpose it is impracticable to 

 make use of any of the national languages, since they are all 



