64 INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



commerce and music lias alread} T shown itself to be irre- 

 sistible, so that a strict carrying out of the principle of 

 "purity" in our national languages has been a practical 

 impossibility. In literature properly so called one will 

 endeavour nevertheless to adhere to this principle, but 

 where the chief question is one of precision of concepts, 

 as in science, language must be regarded as a handmaiden, 

 whose first duty is to obey. For language stands only in a 

 secondary relationship to the independently developed and 

 determined concepts of science, which have been already 

 fixed by the symbols assigned to them, just in the same way 

 that language has fixed the concepts of daily life. 



Independent of the above application, which one mayor 

 may not consider practical, is the intern ationalisation of 

 scientific publications by means of a universally understood 

 auxiliary language, which is becoming every day more 

 urgently necessary. 



This problem, too, cannot be attacked until the concepts 

 of all the sciences in question have received their proper 

 designations. The existing dictionaries of international 

 auxiliary languages contain mostly the expressions of daily 

 life, so that at present these languages are mainly applicable 

 only for such communications. Some success can indeed 

 be obtained in the expression of the higher trains of 

 thought of philosophical reasoning, but here already con- 

 siderable uncertainty exists. It is clear, for instance, that 

 a paper in organic chemistry can only be successfully 

 written in the international language after the transla- 

 tions of the different names for substances occurring in 

 different languages have been mutually agreed upon. 



Consequently the working out of the concepts of the 

 different sciences and the determination of their inter- 

 national designations is the very first task which must be 

 performed before the further objects, international litera- 

 ture and international oral intercourse in science, can be 



