Various

“ He takes the broad ground that language is a transcript, as it were, of life, and that as life widens and becomes more varied, language must do the same. It must reflect the fancy, the imagination, and the humor of the day, and not merely the fancy, imagination, and humor of past generations. If we want a language that is fixed and unalterable in its forms we must seek one that has ceased to be spoken by men. Even then we can not always get absolute decisions. ”

“ With the instinct of a race born for self-government, the Anglo-Saxons have ever sought and almost always found the highest safeguard for their ancient rights in the courts of law. Between a partisan Legislature and a tyrannical Executive an honest judiciary has generally been found ready to annul the excesses of the one and to prevent any infringement by the other; so that it has become a belief, having the force of faith, that in our courts will be found the bulwark of those liberties which we consider essential to the full enjoyment of life. ”

“ The study of science is a continual discouragement of obscurity or vagueness; it is a discipline in the statement and solution of definite problems, and it trains one to see things as they are, apart from all irrelevancies. The technicalities of science, so bewildering to the layman, are merely aids to exactness, avoidances of circumlocution—in short, they are practical devices whereby labor is saved. Economy of effort is one of the features in which the scientific training excels. ”

“ It will not be ashamed to shrink from the shedding of blood. The “young barbarians” of our public schools are always only too ready to exalt might above right; but the judicious teacher into whom the true spirit of science has entered will seize every favorable opportunity for inculcating the great lesson that the moral law has a way of vindicating itself in the end, and that the inheritance of the earth has been promised not to the quarrelsome or the overweening, but to the meek. ”

“ Laws and courts, however, are after all the creation of men, and, like all such creations, they are necessarily imperfect and fallible; or, more correctly, they are organisms which develop and improve. In other words, justice and law are only relatively immutable and perfect. They do, indeed, represent, in a sense, abstract perfection, and at any given time they must be considered the highest criterion of human conduct. But justice and law are not such divinities that they can withdraw themselves from the operation of those forces which we call progress. ”

“ This is but one example of the unprogressiveness of our criminal jurisprudence. Yet, if we really have the ancient principle of the right of life and liberty at heart we ought to recognize that this legal dogma is a greater menace to the practical abrogation of the right than the despotism of an unscrupulous executive. For while the latter is an infringement of a right which the law forbids, the former is a breach of a right which the law sanctions. ”

“ The specialist in money, in stocks, in iron, or in cotton may be just as narrow as the specialist in stars, or reactions, or insects, and know little or nothing of any subject outside his own. Neither narrowness nor breadth of view is monopolized by any vocation. The mere fact that men of science rarely devote their attention to accumulating wealth does not prove them to be unpractical. ”

“ The commercial triumph of the telephone has led to a multitude of scientific bubbles, and has resulted, like the discovery of gold in the Klondike, in a rush into electrical schemes which have been held up to a hungry crowd of victims as second only to the Bell telephone. ”

“ We do not say that when horrors are being enacted in any part of the world force may not righteously be employed to arrest them; but it is clear to our mind that, in the present age, wars between civilized countries might be almost wholly avoided if more reliance were placed upon moral force and less rein given to the impulse to employ physical force. This is a matter for the people in any state enjoying free institutions to take to heart. Let every man in a time of national difficulty ask himself this question: “Do I personally want to have blood shed over this matter?” ”

“ We have known grown-up persons to turn away with a very skeptical air, and a kind of look as if they had found out a weak spot in your educational armor, when they were told that really it was impossible to say which of two pronunciations of a word was right and which was wrong—that either might be employed without mortal offense against elegance of speech or good breeding.
A hidebound view of language tends so much to narrow thought on general subjects that it seems to us of importance that the true and scientific view of the subject should be brought forward whenever opportunity offers. ”

“ At this time, nearly two hundred years after the singular outbreak of chimerical projects of Queen Anne’s reign, we can match some of these bubbles almost exactly; for have we not had the Keeley motor, the extraction of gold from salt water, and is there not great activity in making the wonder of the public over some advance in science a source of money-making? The unscientific person is certainly open to a new danger in the increasing tendency to promote enterprises based upon some new scientific discovery, and it behooves the followers of science to suggest a remedy for this growing evil. ”

“ More mathematics and science, and less philosophy and psychology, might correct that vagueness of thought which leads both men and women into delusion.
Now for our other remedies. Shall we have an academy which shall issue storm warnings of scientific bubbles? I fear that the influence of academies is waning, and that the conviction that there are as many good men outside of the academy as inside would militate against their dicta. ”

“ They should be given a sufficient knowledge of the elements of physical science to know that power can not be created from nothing, and that the great mass of our knowledge of mechanics and of the relation of electricity to mechanics can not be overturned by any new discovery. Whatever is discovered must be related to what has preceded it. This is a characteristic of a science, and this is what distinguishes it from a delusion—namely, the great body of related facts put upon a mechanical basis, so that any fact can be substantiated and any phenomenon repeated. ”

“ In our age greater attention is given to Christian ethics and sociology than ever before. A man who has the ethical enthusiasm of our times is inclined to criticise historical Christianity with great severity, because of its failure to realize the highest ethical ideals, and especially those presented by Jesus in his teaching and his example. Historical Christianity is so far below these ideals, even in its best types, that one is inclined to say if the Church has failed so badly in nineteen centuries, what prospect has it in the present or the future? ”

“ True, it is the action of a majority of the people only—admitting that a majority wanted it—but who is uncompromising enough, when his country’s armies are in the field, to proclaim that they are fighting in a wrong cause? A few may do it, but they do it at their peril. In all other matters a minority may censure with any degree of severity the policy of the majority, but not in the matter of a war once entered on. ”

“ The temptation for unprofessional dealing is here at its highest, because of the manifest advantage of the lawyer who is able, or whom the client believes to be able, to unlock the prison doors. It takes men of more than ordinary fiber to persistently resist such temptation in all its forms. Hence the necessity of upright and learned men at the criminal bar. But how few are our great criminal practitioners! How often have I heard lawyers, too young and clientless to allow themselves preferences, declare most decidedly that they were willing to do anything “except criminal law”! ”

“ Accurate knowledge is a good thing, but rule-of-thumb experience is often thought to be better. It is only when knowledge and experience join hands that the highest practical results are attainable, the one factor tending to advance, the other to perpetuate, industry. The man of affairs is not a practical man until he appreciates the force of these propositions.
At bottom the scientific training is a training in clear thought, precise statement, accurate observation, the verification of evidence, and the ascertainment of truth. ”

“ The war against science, criticism, literature, and art—all that is characteristic of our age—is gradually being limited to a smaller number of theologians and denominations, and there is ever an increasing number of theologians and churches which fully recognize all the achievements of modern times and who are at work in harmonizing them with the verified Christian dogmas in a larger, grander system—in a new theology representing all that is noblest and best in Christianity as applied to the modern world. ”

“ These reflections may not at first sight seem to have a very direct bearing on the interests for which this magazine is supposed to stand, but to our mind science, in the broad sense, has no function so important as that of settling the education of the young upon a right moral basis. No system of education deserves to be called scientific that does not place the idea of justice at the very foundation of human life. You can not do this, however, without making it a working principle, and without inculcating a belief in it as such. ”

“ But this is no evidence that the Christian religion has declined. If men absent themselves from public worship because it is no longer necessary for them, as good citizens and as respectable members of society, to attend, or because they may get their instruction and stimulation elsewhere easier and with less expenditure of time and money, that is simply an evidence that attendance upon church in the past has been due in great measure to other than religious reasons, and that, these no longer holding, attendance has disappeared with them. ”

“ Under our system the courts are obliged to let the conclusions of the learned judges who occupied the bench three hundred years ago have more weight than the positive investigations of the men of science of our day, and so, consciously or unconsciously, numberless crimes are committed in the name of stare decisis. True it is that in some jurisdictions, and notably in New York, the courts have recognized to some extent the progress of science and its influence upon juridic theories. ”

“ The scientific view of language, then, is that it represents the effort of mankind to use audible symbols for the expression of thought; that it follows the development of man’s activity and enlarges with his enlarging knowledge, and comprehension of things; that while its object is essentially a practical one it gathers beauty with use and age, and begins to react on the minds of its makers ”

“ The commercial enterprises of the world have been brought within reach of the many by the telegraph and telephone. They no longer belong to the few, while the successful working of the field of science is still confined to a minority and the general public; even the cultivated people are very ignorant of the approaches to the New El Dorado. No bogus land scheme or salted mining enterprise can be kept in existence to-day for a long period; but the Keeley motor, with its ethereal vibrations and its pseudo-molecular motions, was limited in activity only by the life of the promoter. ”

“ We are indeed confronted with the curious fact that even so-called intelligent people can be led to believe that what we have learned in regard to the working of Nature may be thrown aside, and that some new and unrelated laws may rule supreme. Thus we have what is called Christian Science, one of the intuitional sciences which may be said to add a new peril to matrimony. We find cultivated men believing that a government can make money by pronouncing silver equal to gold. ”

“ Applying the principle to national affairs, we see at once that a strong nation which desires to be just will take no advantage of its strength in its dealings with other nations. If it has a demand to make, it will make it simply in the name of justice, and cast no sidelong glances at its up-to-date battle ships or its well-equipped battalions. It will have unbounded patience with weaker communities, which, rightly or wrongly, may seem to think they have right on their side. ”

“ The ordinary school education in language and grammar is doubtless responsible for the impression which we find existing in so many minds that, in all matters of verbal expression, there is some one absolute standard of authority to which it implies simply ignorance not to bow—some supreme court, as it were, empowered to decide for us what words we are to use, how we are to pronounce them, and what rules of syntax we are to follow. ”

“ We find, in the annals of the time, that the Duchess of Marlborough persuaded her husband, John Churchill, the great general, not to increase his holdings, and to sell his shares; he, like a sensible man, took a sensible woman’s advice and made one hundred thousand pounds. When we come to speak of the connection of women with modern delusions, we must remember this act of one of their sex. ”

“ In order, therefore, to protect the public against scientific bubbles we must impress upon both men and women the fact that an education in science is desirable, and is becoming more important as the world grows older; but until a scientific education becomes more general, it is important that there should be some scientific oracle of Delphos, and I can not think of any better than a well-managed scientific journal, the editors of which will seek for the best information on scientific questions which interest the financial world. ”

“ Belief is the inclination of the mind toward a proposition for which absolute or demonstrative proof is wanting, and it is this condition of mind, it seems to us, that our correspondent has in view. Faith in the religious sense, unless we are mistaken, is something different. It is an affirmation made by the human conscience or consciousness in its own behalf—a certain instinctive recognition of a presence and power in the universe which, though inaccessible to scientific investigation, sustains an intimate, profound, and all-essential relation to man’s moral nature. ”

“ If there is inertia as to changes in the law it is probably because, while feeling that there is something wrong, the people either can not define it or the conservatism of centuries in this field is unconsciously affecting their better intentions. Who will deny (and I address this question to lawyers and judges) that, under our system, guilty men escape and innocent men suffer in larger numbers than it should be, even allowing for the defects inherent in all human systems?—that technicalities and not facts often save scoundrels ”

“ The voice of the trained investigator might well be heard in Congress, but his testimony now is limited to the committee room. Even there it is received with an attention which is too often mingled with incredulity. The myth of the dreamer, the visionary, is more than half believed.
The supposed type, then, is not a type, but an exception—a man of straw, which is hardly worth overthrowing. But the belief in it has been and still is mischievous, a hindrance to wise action, an obstacle to progress. The misconception has worked injury to science. ”

“ A globe so large as the earth, under the influence of its own gravity, must behave like a very stiffly viscous body—that is, the general form of the earth and its greatest inequalities must be in substantial static equilibrium. For example, the general form of the earth is oblate spheroid, because that is the only form of equilibrium of a rotating body. Rotation determines a distribution of gravity with latitude which brings about this form. With any other form the earth would be in a state of strain to which it must slowly yield, and finally relieve itself by becoming oblate. ”

“ Mountains, therefore, have always been a subject of deepest interest both to the popular and the scientific mind—an interest intensified by the splendors of mountain scenery and the perils of mountain exploration. The study of mountains is therefore coeval with the study of geology. As early as the beginning of the present century Constant Prevost observed that most characteristic structure of mountains—viz., their folded strata—and inferred their formation by lateral pressure. ”

“ DIRECTOR OF JEFFERSON PHYSICAL LABORATORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY. The advances in science lead to hopes of the sudden accumulation of gold, just as the discovery of new worlds led our ancestors to invest in many inflated enterprises of commerce and conquest. This older temptation has passed away, for there are no new worlds to discover, and this small globe has been practically staked out; but the mysterious domains of science are still illimitable, and afford vast opportunities for inflated schemes which have their prototype in the South Sea Bubble. ”

“ Mill, therefore, ‘I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures.’ And, going a step further, I will add that it is impossible to call that being good who, existing prior to the phenomenal universe and creating it out of the plenitude of infinite power and foreknowledge, endowed it with such properties that its material and moral development must inevitably be attended by the misery of untold millions of sentient creatures for whose existence their Creator is ultimately alone responsible. ”

“ On the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species by Descent with Modification, Lyell at once embraced the new view as a completion of his principle of causes now in operation and his doctrine of uniformitarianism. In a certain superficial sense evolution is certainly confirmatory of the doctrine of uniformity of causes and processes in the past and the present, but in a deeper sense it is quite contrary in its spirit. Uniformitarians of the Lyell school look upon geology as a chronicle of events—evolutionists as a life history of the earth. ”