January 2, 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



13 



ting to science too great an extensity and 

 in failing to reach any just appreciation 

 of the intensity of science. Every one 

 should know that a specialist's idea of a 

 thing, such as a gas, an electric current, or 

 a beam of light, comes very near to being 

 a working model of the thing. The ele- 

 ments out of which such models ax'e made 

 are purely notional, and although the 

 specialist habitually speaks of them in ob- 

 jective terms for the sake of concreteness 

 and clearness, it is of the utmost impor- 

 tance that the thought be chiefly directed 

 to the physical facts which are represented 

 and not to the models themselves. 'Our 

 method,' says Bacon, 'is continually to 

 dwell among things soberly, without ab- 

 stracting or setting the mind farther from 

 them than makes their images meet,' and 

 'The capital precept for the whole under- 

 taking is that the eye of the mind be never 

 taken off from things themselves, but re- 

 ceive their images as they truly are, and 

 God forbid that we should ever offer the 

 dreams of fancy for a model of the world.' 

 There is a tendency among reflecting 

 men to confuse the boundaries between our 

 logical constructions and the objective 

 realms which they represent to the under- 

 standing. Miinsterberg thinks that this is 

 the gravest danger of our time. I do not 

 fully agree with this, but I do agree with 

 President Wilson in seeing in this confu- 

 sion of boundaries the effects of a noxious 

 gas which has somehow got into the lungs 

 of other men from out of the crevices of 

 our workshops, a gas, it would seem, 

 which forms only in the outer air and 

 where men do not know the right use of 

 their lungs. 



This confusion of boundaries is, to my 

 mind, a new species of idolatry. The old 

 idolatry is the worship of form, and this 

 new idolatry is that contemplation of our 

 logical constructions which despises objec- 



tive constraint. Now, I can not see that, ^ 

 we as scientists are in any degree respon-; 

 sible for this disservice, this working of a^ ; 

 great degeneracy among men, but as indis/ 

 viduals I think most of us are guilty of. 

 more or less frequent and flagrant lapses, 

 of that submission to objective constraints 

 which is the very essence of moral quality, " 

 in scientific work. 



An amusing collection of instances ofi, 

 this new idolatry, which we all know is, 

 not so very new after all, is given by De-v ' 

 Morgan in his 'Budget of Paradoxes. V' 

 There are many more of these paradoxes,j' 

 to use DeMorgan's word for those uncon-/ 

 strained flights of the scientific imagina-r.'* 

 tion, in the mathematical and physical. 

 sciences than in biology. The explanation;' 

 of this fact is, I think, that the logical ' 

 structures of those sciences are to a great 

 extent concrete in character so that even, 

 strong minds may lose sight of the boun- 

 daries between the realms of the mind and 

 the realms of objective reality. The wide 

 difference between the logical structures, 

 of physics and of biology may be further; 

 illustrated if I mention that I have long.' 

 been impressed with the fact that the most' 

 satisfactory specialist to talk with is the- 

 biologist. His knowledge is not repre-. 

 sented to his understanding by a mathe- 

 matical-mechanical system of conceptions/ 

 but it approaches art in its close associa- 

 tion with external form. Conversation.* ' 

 with a physicist is, however, very like look- 

 ing into the mechanism of a Mergenthaler' 

 type-casting machine, with the machine 

 out of sight, a thing which is feasible 

 enough among designers and builders, but 

 scarcely a satisfactory basis for the flowj 

 of thought when one party in the conversa-'^ 

 tion happens to be unfamiliar with and 

 perhaps not interested in the mechanism in' 

 question. 



Having so far expressed a degree of sym-. 



