20 INTEENATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



once reached a certain degree of suitability they are not 

 afterwards easily replaced by others. There is, therefore, 

 only one adequate criterion of the stability of an inter- 

 national language, namely, that of suitability or adaptation 

 to its purpose, and we maintain that it is only by means of 

 continuous reforms and improvements that it will succeed in 

 satisfying this criterion and so finally attain to stability. 

 In the work of Couturat and Leau, referred to above, there 

 are described about ten artificial languages which have 

 sprung up during and after the period of Volapiik and 

 Esperanto, and in which the experience of their pre- 

 decessors has been more or less made use of. A study of 

 these attempts leads to the surprising result that they often 

 differ amongst themselves less than, for example, the 

 Romance languages. If, then, one were to choose any one 

 of these languages and to direct its systematic development 

 according to the principles which experience and knowledge 

 have shown to be requisite for the construction of an inter- 

 national language, one would in each case arrive finally at 

 approximately the same result. 



At the present day the rapid development in every 

 department of life has made us only too ready to regard 

 everything around us as transient. We forget, however, 

 that the rapidly accumulating inventions and discoveries 

 which startle and surprise us always refer to new things. 

 One must bear in mind that there also exist things which 

 in their essential features can only be invented once, and 

 that the international language in its final form is one of 

 these. 



An excellent means of convincing the incredulous is to 

 demonstrate the absence of arbitrariness in the character of 

 an invention or improvement, and the degree of general 

 consent which a given system has already obtained. When- 

 ever one has recognised the natural and logical basis of a 

 discovery one perceives relationships which restrict the 



