Most of our citizens take a wide interest in
public affairs, else our form of government would be a failure.
But it is desirable that their study of public measures should be
more critical and take a wider range. It is especially desirable
that the conclusions to which they are led should be unaffected by
partisan sympathies. The more strongly the love of mere truth is
inculcated in their nature the better this end will be attained.
The scientific discipline to which I ask mainly to call your
attention consists in training the scholar to the scientific use
of language. Although whole volumes may be written on the logic of
science there is one general feature of its method which is of
fundamental significance. It is that every term which it uses and
every proposition which it enunciates has a precise meaning which
can be made evident by proper definitions. This general principle
of scientific language is much more easily inculcated by example
than subject to exact description; but I shall ask leave to add
one to several attempts I have made to define it. If I should say
that when a statement is made in the language of science the
speaker knows what he means, and the hearer either knows it or can
be made to know it by proper definitions, and that this community
of understanding is frequently not reached in other departments of
thought, I might be understood as casting a slur on whole
departments of inquiry.
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