Januaey 27, 1899.] 



SCIENCE. 



133 



would be, as be never tires of repeating it, 

 viz., tbattlie bane ofall thinking is the use of 

 the same word in different senses, whereby 

 the ideas are confused by the sounds of the 

 words. But must we make a new language 

 to obviate this? Is it not due to the mud- 

 dle-headedness of those who use the words? 

 And will not order come out of this chaos 

 when people learn to think clearly irrre- 

 spective of words ? It may be compared to 

 the agitation about phonetics. Our lan- 

 guage has only 26 letters, but over 40 

 sovinds, and j'et many of these letters have 

 several sounds. The spelling reformers say 

 this is illogical. There should be just as 

 many letters as sounds, and each letter 

 should have one sound and one only. All 

 this is true, and no one disputes it. But it 

 is a condition and not a theory that con- 

 fronts us, and it is found that our alphabet, 

 with all its admitted defects, is capable of 

 forming all the words of the language. Both 

 the forms and the meanings of words are 

 products of evolution and have Lad their 

 history and genesis, and this evolution is 

 constantly going on far more rapidly than 

 the radical reformers suspect in the direc- 

 tion of rationality and logicality. It is, in- 

 deed, observed that attempts at hasty re- 

 form in orthography tend to arrest natural 

 development and fossilize language, as wit- 

 ness the practice of dropping the syllable al in 

 all adjectives in ical, which interferes with 

 an obvious natural diiferentiation in the 

 meaning of the short and long forms, clearly 

 seen in the diiierence already acquired be- 

 tween such words as historic and historical, 

 2}olitic and jjolitical, microscojnc and microscop- 

 ical (what, for example, would a microscopic 

 society be?). 



The natural impulse is to ignore the de- 

 ficiencies that one sees in a work of this 

 nature and take up the enumeration of the 

 many sterling qualities that it so manifestly 

 possesses, but aside from the fact that this 

 would be quite useless to the reader, since 



he will see them for himself, one is here 

 confronted with so many actual difficulties 

 in the way of the comprehension of the 

 scheme that it seems necessary to devote 

 whatever space may be left after this at- 

 tempt at exposition to the consideration of 

 a few at least of these difficulties. There 

 is certainly one salient feature of the work 

 that demands a passing notice. It claims 

 to be ' the Philosophy of Science,' as op- 

 posed to ' Idealism,' on the one hand, and 

 ' Materialism,' on the other, and a large part 

 of it is devoted to soundly belaboring both 

 these spurious systems, but especially what 

 the author calls vietaphysics, which rests upon 

 idealism. The arch-enemy of Truth and 

 chief source of Error is the philosophy which 

 reduces the universe to a subjective state of 

 the thinking or knowing mind. What is 

 elsewhere called ' epistemology,' and is de- 

 fined as ' the theory of knowledge,' proves 

 uniformly to be a theory of no-knowledge, 

 or a proof that the mind can know nothing 

 but its own states. Major Powell calls this 

 book a treatise on epistemology (which is 

 always written ' epistomology,' as if it had 

 to do with the digestive rather than the 

 cogitative apparatus). But, unlike the cur- 

 rent epistemology, its aim is to show that 

 there is an objective, knowable world, the 

 world with which science so effectively 

 deals. All this is well, and no scientific 

 man can object to it. But how does he suc- 

 ceed in this? When, as at the thresh- 

 old, he approaches the nature of mat- 

 ter he is baffied as completely as the 

 school boy, or as the other savants who 

 have grappled with this problem. He 

 seems to think, however, that he has found 

 a way out of the difficulty. Between the 

 thesis and the antithesis of the second 

 Kantian antinomy he thinks he has found 

 a Hegelian synthesis. This compromise or 

 reconciliation consists in maintaining, as 

 the term implies, that the five ' constituents ' 

 constitute matter. These constituents, as 



