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SCIENCE 



[Vol. LV, No. 1419 



more absolutely trusted," yet it is equally true, 

 as observed by Cowley, quoted by Robinson, 

 that "Bacon missed success in detail because 

 he was striving to encompass nearly the whole 

 field of nature in a life which was engi-ossed 

 with work enough of other kinds to keep a 

 strong man busy." But Bacon suffered even 

 more from the absence of a clear recognition on 

 the pai-t of the age in which he lived of the 

 truth fundamental to his aims, that informa- 

 tion and belief are not a substitute for a knowl- 

 edge of facts and a recognition of their relative 

 importance. The purpose of the Baconian 

 philosophy is contained in. the prediction that 

 "Men's power over nature would be increased 

 a thousand fold when they learned to interpret 

 her with the humility of truth seekers easting 

 aside all prepossessions," a prediction realized 

 in no small measure in modern life freed from 

 a vast amount of the credulity, deliberate false- 

 hood, and class bias, which mar the greatest 

 achievements of Bacon's time. 



But mankind is still a long distance from 

 having recognized that truth alone can make us 

 truly free. There is, no doubt, a considerable 

 degree of practical utility in common errors. 

 Since all of our human relations are based on 

 relative conceptions of truth the margin of 

 error may be large or small as circumstances 

 permit, but only for short range efforts. It 

 matters little whether the distance I am to 

 walk is a mile, or nine-tenths, or even less in 

 my estimation, but it makes a world of differ- 

 ence whether the calculated position at sea is 

 correct within a small fraction of the longi- 

 tude and latitude determined by the sextant. 

 And just as surely as small eiTors repeated 

 and accumulated lead to disaster at sea, so 

 more serious errors in conduct, individual or 

 social, may defeat a course laid out in ignor- 

 ance of the truth. 



The clearest recognition of this principle of 

 right action is the statement by Mill in his 

 discourse on "Fallacies of Observation," in 

 connection with which it is said that "A fallacy 

 of misobservation may be either negative or 

 positive; either non-observation or mal- obser- 

 vation." This important distinction is ex- 

 plained in part that "It is non-observation when 



all the error consists in overlooking or neglect- 

 ing facts or particulars which ought to have 

 been observed. It is mal-observation when 

 something is simply unseen or seen wrong; 

 when the fact or phenomenon instead of being 

 recognized for what it is in reality is mis- 

 taken for something else." 



Both errors are of such common occurrence 

 in every-day life that they are the rule rather 

 than the exception among those whose judg- 

 ments are relied upon as a matter of course in 

 the conduct of affairs of the first importance. 

 Mill recognized this limitation of the average 

 understanding, pointing out in his discussion 

 of Fallacies that "In the conduct of life — in 

 the practical business of mankind — wrong in- 

 ference, incorrect interpretation of experience, 

 unless after much culture of the thinking facul- 

 ty are absolutely inevitable; and with most 

 people after the highest degree of culture they 

 ever attain, such erroneous inferences, produc- 

 ing corresponding errors in conduct, are la- 

 mentably frequent." Yet as clearly as this is 

 stated and admitted as a fact of every-day 

 experience, generation after generation grows 

 up in ignorance of the inherent limitations of 

 the human understanding, the serious danger of 

 unorganized knowledge, and the menace of a 

 continuous stream of mere information much of 

 which is only guesswork, possibly grossly false 

 in matters of detail, while all of it, by itself, 

 may be totally unrelated to the practical needs 

 of every-day life. 



There is an imperative demand for accuracy 

 in public utterance which falls lamentably 

 short of the ideal. Statesmen utter weighty 

 opinions on matters of verifiable knowledge 

 obtuse to the implication of wilful ignorance, 

 if not wilful deception. Even in high places 

 the most vague distinctions prevail between 

 what is mere opinion and what is fact and 

 truth. Almost half a century ago George Corn- 

 wall Lewis in a very readable treatise on the 

 "Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion" 

 called attention to the need of a clear grasp 

 of this distinction, holding that "a large pro- 

 portion of the general opinions of mankind 

 are derived merely from authority and are 

 entertained without any distinct understand- 



