March 26, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



449 



erased, seeing that they must have been 

 quite as inferior to those of a widely expe- 

 rienced mountaineer as those which the pic- 

 tures could have given were inferior to 

 mine. Who is so foolish as to argue that 

 no one should learn anything about, say 

 London, unless he means to master all its 

 plans, its architecture and its history in 

 their every phase, feature and detail ? Who 

 would contend that, because we are per- 

 mitted to know only so little of what is 

 happening in the European war, we ought 

 to remain in total ignorance of it? Who 

 would say that no one may with propriety 

 seek to learn something about ancient Rome 

 unless he is bent on becoming a Gibbon or 

 a Mommsen? It is undoubtedly true that 

 an endeavor to present a body of doctrine 

 or a science to such as can not receive it 

 fully must result in giving a false impres- 

 sion of the truth. But the notion that such 

 an endeavor is therefore wrong is a notion 

 which, if consistently and thoroughly car- 

 ried out, would put the human mind en- 

 tirely out of commission. All impressions, 

 all views, all theories, all doctrines, all 

 sciences are false in the sense of being par- 

 tial, imperfect, incomplete. "II n'y a plus 

 des problemes resolus et d'autres qui ne le 

 sont pas, il y a seulement des problemes 

 plus ou moins resolus," said Henri Poin- 

 care. Every one must see that, but for 

 the helpfulness of views which because in- 

 complete are also in a measure false, even 

 the practical conduct of life, not to say the 

 advancement of science, would be impos- 

 sible. There is no other choice: either we 

 must subsist upon fragments or perish. 



Again, many a specialist shrinks from 

 trying to present his subject to laymen 

 because he looks upon such activity as a 

 species of what is called popularization of 

 science, and he believes that such populari- 

 zation, even in its best sense, closely re- 

 sembles vulgarization in its worst. He 



fancies that there is a sharp line bounding 

 off knowledge that is mere knowledge from 

 knowledge that is scientific. In his view 

 science is for specialists and for specialists 

 only. He declines, on something like moral 

 and esthetic grounds, to engage in what he 

 calls playing to the gallery. It might, of 

 course, be said that there is more than one 

 way of playing to the gallery. It could be 

 said that one way consists in acting the 

 role of one who imagines that his intellec- 

 tual interests are so austere and elevated 

 and his thought so profound that a just 

 sense of the awful dignity of his vocation 

 imposes upon him, when in presence of the 

 vulgar multitude, the solemn law of silence. 

 It would be ungenerous, however, if not 

 unfair, to insist upon the justice of such a 

 possible retort. Rather let it be granted, 

 for it is true, that much so-called populari- 

 zation of science is vicious, relieving the 

 ignorant of their modesty without relieving 

 them of their ignorance, equipping them 

 with the vocabulary of knowledge without 

 its content and so fostering not only a vain 

 and empty conceit, but a certain facility of 

 speech that is seemly, impressive and valu- 

 able only when, as is too seldom the case, 

 it is accompanied by solid attainments. To 

 say this, however, is not' to lay an indict- 

 ment against that kind of scientific popu- 

 larization which was so happily illustrated 

 by the very greatest men of antiquity, 

 which was not disdair.ed even by Galileo in 

 the beginnings of modern science nor by 

 Leonardo da Vinci, and which in our own 

 time has engaged the interest and skill of 

 such men as Clifford and Helmholtz, 

 Haeckel and Huxley, Maeh, Ostwald, En- 

 riques and Henri Poineare. It is not to 

 arraign that variety of popularization 

 which any one may behold in the constant 

 movement of ideas, once reserved exclu- 

 sively for graduate students, down into 

 undergraduate curricula and which has. 



