THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 29 



ing her a specimen to study, came day after day, 

 and asked, with a cruel kindliness: "Well, what 

 do you see now?" and then went away. But 

 at length the student saw something saw what 

 was to be seen, and more also. 



What science knows it must know definitely; 

 what it sees must be in focus. It feels the wisdom 

 of one of Bacon's aphorisms often verified in his- 

 tory: "Truth to emerge sooner from error than 

 from confusion." The definitizing of error is 

 often the beginning of its disappearance. When 

 the evil genie of the Eastern tales took on definite 

 bodily form there was some chance of tackling 

 him; as a mere wraith he was unassailable. 



One of the expressions of the scientific endea- 

 vour after clearness is to be found in precision of 

 speech. Thus Prof. Silvanus P. Thompson says 

 of Lord Kelvin: "He hated ambiguities of lan- 

 guage, and statements which mislead by loose- 

 ness of phrasing. With painful effort he strove 

 for clarity of expression, elaborating his phrases 

 in a way that threatened at times to defeat the 

 end intended. In that hazy medium of words 

 wherein we all drown, he at least would attempt 

 to observe the proprieties of language. As an 

 example take this: Externally the sense of touch, 

 other than heat, is the same in all cases it is 

 a sense of forces, and of places of application of 

 forces, and of directions of forces." 





