18 Journal of the Mitchell Society. \_May 
concrete connotations of the ordinary terms of general and 
mathematical language. And yet, as Professor E. H. Moore 
has pertinently suggested, “the question arises whether the 
abstract mathematicians in making precise the metes and 
bounds of logic and the special deductive sciences are not 
losing sight of the evolutionary character of all life-processes, 
whether in the individual or in the race. Certainly the log- 
icians do not consider their science as something now fixed. 
All science, logic and mathematics included, is a function of 
the epoch — all science, in its ideals as well as in its achieve- 
ments One has then the feeling that the carrying 
out in an absolute sense of the program of the abstract math- 
ematicians will be found impossible. At the same time, one 
recognizes the importance attaching to the effort to do pre- 
cisely this thing. The requirement of rigor tends toward 
essential simplicity of procedure, as Hilbert has insisted in 
his Paris address, and the remark applies to this question of 
mathematical logic and its abstract expression.”* 
Perhaps a not unnatural confusion may arise in the mind 
of the layman in regard to the ultimate meaning, the far- 
reaching significance of these discoveries. As Artemus 
Ward used to say, “Why this thusness?” Indeed so revolu- 
tionary have many of the new theories and discoveries ap- 
peared that their authors, in more than one instance, have 
hesitated long before giving them to the world. The pio- 
neers in science sometimes dread, not inadvisedly, the pos- 
sibility that their startling and epoch-making hypotheses and 
investigations may lead them to be dubbed sensationalists 
and fakirs. Compare, for example, the letter Gauss wrote to 
Bessel, Jan. 27, 1829: 
“I have also in my leisure hours frequently reflected upon another 
problem, now of nearly forty years standing. I refer to the founda- 
tions of geometry. I do not know whether I have ever mentioned 
to you my views on this matter. My meditations have also taken 
*0n the Foundations of Mathematics , by E. H. Moore. Presidential ad- 
dress, Am. Math. Soc. , Dec. 29, 1902. Science, March 13, 1903, pp.401-416. 
