harmony with this essential part of the undertaking.

The aspect which he dislikes is this: If we are to invite the leaders of all special sciences, each to consider the relations of his science to the other departments of knowledge, then we must clearly chop the one totality of knowledge into many special parts. That involves at once certain principles of division about which different opinions may exist. We have agreed to recognize 25 different departments with 134 sections, and such decision involves, of course, at once a certain grouping. The sections of the same department stand nearer together than the sections of different departments, and some of those departments again stand in close relations and thus form larger units. We grouped our 25 departments into 7 such chief divisions. Now Professor Dewey says we had no right to do all this, because our classification partly anticipates the work which is to be done by those who are to give the addresses. If each department has from the beginning a definite place on the program, its relations to all other sciences are determined beforehand and it has become superfluous to call in the scholars of the world simply to concur in the committee's ideas concerning the system of knowledge.

But I might ask, what else ought we to have done? I know very well that instead of the 134 sections, we might have been satisfied with half that number or might have indulged in double that number. But whatever number we might have agreed on, it would have remained open to the reproach that our decision was arbitrary, and yet we did not see a plan which allowed us to invite the speakers without defining beforehand the sectional field which each was to represent. A certain courage of opinion was then necessary and a certain adjustment to external conditions was unavoidable; in every case we consulted a large number of specialists. Quite similar is the question of classification. Just as we had to take the responsibility for the staking out of every section, we had also to decide in favor of a certain grouping if we desired to organize the congress and not simply to bring

out a helter-skelter performance. Professor Dewey says: "The essential trait of the scientific life of to-day is its live-and-let-live character." I agree with that fully. In the regular work in our libraries and laboratories the year round everything depends upon this democratic freedom in which every one goes his own way, never asking what his neighbor is doing. It is that which has made the specialistic sciences of our day as strong as they are. But it has brought about at the same time this extreme tendency to disconnected specialization with its discouraging lack of unity; this heaping up of information without an ordered and harmonious view of the world; and if we are going to do what we aim at, if we want really to satisfy, at least once, the desire for unity, the longing for coordinations, then the hour has come in which we must not yield to this live-and-letlive tendency. It would mean to give up this ideal if we were to start at once without any principle of organization, ordering the sciences according to the alphabet, perhaps, instead of according to logic. The principles

which are sufficient for a directory would undermine from the first the monument of scientific thought which we hope to see erected through the cooperation of the leaders of science. Therefore, some principle had to be accepted. And just as with number of sections, it may be said here too, that whatever principle could have been chosen would probably have had its defects and would certainly have been open to the criticism that it was a product of individual arbitrary decision.

A classification which in itself expresses all the practical relations in which sciences stand to each other is of course absolutely impossible. Professor Dewey's own science, psychology, has relations to philosophy, relations to physiology, and thus to medicine, relations to education and sociology, relations to history and language, relations to religion and law. A program which should try to arrange the place of psychology in the classified list in a way that psychology should become the neighbor of all these other sciences is unthinkable. On the other hand, only if we had tried to construct a scheme of such ex

aggerated ambitions, should we have been really guilty of anticipating a part of that which our speakers are to tell us. We leave it to the invited scholar to discuss the totality of relations which practically must exist between psychology and other departments of knowledge. We confine ourselves to that minimum of classification which indicates the pure logical relation of the science in the sense of subordination and coordination, that minimum which every editor of an encyclopædic work would be asked to indicate without awakening suspicion of interference with the ideas of his contributors.

The only justified demand which could be made was that we choose a system of division and classification which should give fair play to every existing scientific tendency. And here alone came in the claim which I made for that scheme which has been accepted for the congress. I believed that our classification, more fully than any other, would leave room for every wholesome tendency of our times. I showed that a materialistic system would give fair opportunity to the natural sciences but not to the mental sciences; that a positivistic system would offer room for both mental and natural sciences; but that only an idealistic system has room for all; for the naturalistic and mental sciences, and also for those tendencies which are aiming at an interpretative as well as a descriptive account of civilization. And while we are trying to get, as I said, an organization with a minimum of classification, we were thus trying to provide at the same time for a maximum of freedom. Whatever other principles. of classification we might have chosen would have led to an arbitrary suppression of some existing tendencies in modern thought. To use Professor Dewey's illustration: Those students of art, history, politics and education who treat them as systems of phenomena and those who treat them as systems of purposes, alike find in different sections their full opportunity. I have a slight impression that Professor Dewey would have preferred a classification which would have room only for one of the two groups. Our congress will

be less partial than our critics. We shall have place and freedom for all.

But there is no reason to speak to-day, as I had to do in May, of a plan for the future. Our undertaking has already a little history. The program has been tried. Then was the moment for the appearance of those destructive effects which Professor Dewey feared. Professor Newcomb, Professor Small and I, who have been honored by the invitation to work as an organizing committee, have just returned from Europe, where we were to bring personal invitations to those who had been selected for the chief addresses. Professors Newcomb and Small visited France, England, Austria, Italy and Russia. I had to see the scholars of Germany and Switzerland. As the Germans have the reputation of being the most obstinate in their scientific ideas, their attitude towards the presented program may be considered as the severest test of it. I had to approach 98 scholars in Germany. Every one saw the full program with the ominous classification of science before he made his decision. Only one third of those whom I invited felt obliged to decline, and among them was not a single one who refused to come on account of the objections foreshadowed by Profesor Dewey. Some can not come because of ill health, some because of public engagements, some on account of the expense, and some because they are afraid of sea-sickness, but not a single one gave the slightest hint that he was disturbed by the limitations which the program might put on him. On the other hand, among those two thirds whom we hope to see here next September, very many expressed their deep sympathy with the plans and the program, and not a few insisted that it was just this which tempted them to risk the cumbersome voyage, while they would have disliked to participate in a routine congress without connected plan and program.

Of course that would not count for much in the minds of my critics, if those who have promised to come and deliver addresses under the conditions of our program were merely 'literary folk who indulge in such extravagances.' I may pick out some of the German

names. For human anatomy there comes Waldeyer of Berlin; for comparative anatomy, Fuerbringer of Heidelberg; for embryology, Hertwig of Berlin; for physiology, Engelmann of Berlin; for neurology, Erb of Heidelberg; for pathology, Marchand of Leipzig; for pathological anatomy, Orth of Berlin; for biology, Weismann of Freiburg; for botany, Goebel of Munich; for mineralogy, Zirkel of Leipzig; for geography, Gerland of Strassburg; for physical chemistry, Van't Hoff of Berlin; for physiological chemistry, Kossel of Heidelberg; for geophysics, Weichert of Göttingen; for mechanical engineering, Riedler of Berlin; for chemical technology, Witt of Berlin, and so on. Or to turn to the department of Professor Dewey: For history of philosophy, Windelband of Heidelberg; for logic, Riehl of Halle; for philosophy of nature, Ostwald of Leipzig; for methodology of science, Erdmann of Bonn; for aesthetics, Lipps of Munich; for for psychology, Ebbinghaus of Breslau; for sociology, Toennies of Kiel; for social psychology, Simmel of Berlin; for ethnology, von den Steinen of Berlin; for pedagogy, Ziegler of Strassburg. Or to mention some other departments: Among the philologists I notice Brugman of Leipzig, Paul of Munich, Delitzsch of Berlin; Sievers of Leipzig, Kluge of Freiburg, Muncker of Munich; Oldenberg of Kiel and others. Among the economists, Schmoller of Berlin, Weber of Heidelberg, Stieda of Leipzig, Conrad of Halle, Sombart of Breslau, Wagner of Berlin. Among the jurists, Binding of Leipzig, Zorn of Bonn, Jellineck of Heidelberg, von Lizst of Berlin, Wach of Leipzig, von Bar of Göttingen, Kahl of Berlin, Zitelmann of Bonn, and so on. Among the theologians, Harnack of Berlin, Budde of Marburg, Pfleiderer of Berlin. For classical art, Furtwaengler of Munich; for modern art, Muther of Breslau; for medieval history, Lamprecht of Leipzig. Enough of the enumeration. The list from England and from France is on the same level, and I anticipate that when we soon shall send out invitations to several hundred Americans for definite addresses, their response will not be less general, their list not less noble. But American par

The

ticipation is a question of the future. list of acceptances which I have given here stands as a matter of fact beyond discussion. Is there really any doubt still possible that we have secured on the basis of that disastrous program the greatest combination of leaders of thought which has ever been brought together? When we three came home from our European mission after four months of hard labor to secure this result surpassing our own expectations, we might have felt justified in the hope that scientific men of this country would welcome us otherwise than with the cry that we, under the guise of science, have made science ridiculous. HUGO MÜNSTERBERG.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, October 12, 1903.

SHORTER ARTICLES.

A PLEA FOR BETTER ENGLISH IN SCIENCE.

THAT to genuine scholarship is not always conjoined power of expression is common knowledge. Not a few men who have received academic training and have been honored with university degrees, who have explored profound mysteries of nature and discovered hidden laws, seem to be incapable of clearly explaining the processes they employ in their researches or of plainly setting forth their discoveries.

Not long ago a contributor to The Critic said:

The development of scientific method is alleged to be one of the foremost characteristics of the present century. Philologists will ransack the earth, if not the heavens, for exact information as to date and authorship of even the fragments of ancient literature; botanists will tramp the forests for months to verify or disprove the rumor of a new orchid, and astronomers will go to any accessible point on the face of the globe for more exact figures on an eclipse or a transit of Venus. We might expect, then, to find a corresponding effort for exactness in the expression of thought, but an examination of the evidence is not altogether encouraging.

A few months ago a Boston editor published the following paragraph:

The English language is suffering violence in many ways. Among those who are forgetting its

grace and beauty, the elements of its power, and the right use of it, are the students of pure and applied science, who, being eager in youth to get at their work directly, despise such mere scholastic accomplishments as rhetoric, grammar and logic. The result often is that, when they have discovered something which they are eager to give to the world and which the world ought to know, they have no vehicle of language and style worthy to convey their noble facts and great ideas to the public. Many a scientific man has learned in middle life, with bitter regret, that he must take a lower place than he deserves among his fellow-workers because he can not tell what he knows in language that is intelligible and attractive.

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Others have been hindered in their course, and never knew the reason why.

But worse than inability to write vigorously and pleasingly is the widespread lack of appreciation of clear and precise expression. De Quincey, in his celebrated essay on 'Style,' said, referring especially to professional authors:

Proof lies before you, spread out upon every page, that no excess of awkwardness, or of inelegance, or of unrhythmical cadence, is so rated in the tariff of faults as to balance, in the writer's estimate, the trouble of remoulding a clause, of interpolating a phrase, or even of striking a pen through a superfluous word. The evidence is perpetual, not so much that they rest satisfied with their own random preconceptions of each clause or sentence, as that they never trouble themselves to form any such preconceptions. Whatever words tumble out under the blindest accidents of the moment, those are the words retained.

In his 'Principles of Success in Literature,' George Henry Lewes, referring to the writings of philosophers and men of science, said:

If you allude in their presence to the deplorably defective presentation of the ideas in some work distinguished for its learning, its profundity, or its novelty, it is probable that you will be despised as a frivolous setter up of manner over matter, a light-minded dilettante, unfitted for the simple austerities of science. But this is itself a light-minded contempt; a deeper insight would change the tone, and help to remove the disgraceful slovenliness and feebleness of composition which deface the majority of grave works, except those written by Frenchmen, who have been taught

that composition is an art, and that no writer may neglect it.

If these strictures are just, the subject demands attention.

I am well acquainted with the writings, as found in manuscripts submitted for publication, of about one hundred scientists, young, middle-aged and old. One is justified in supposing that on such manuscripts the authors have done their best work. I have classified these authors in three groups: Good, fair, poor-'good' meaning those whose writing is clear, orderly and forcible; 'fair' meaning those whose writing is, indeed, clear and passably methodical, but is not forcible; and 'poor' meaning those whose writing is turbid or chaotic or has other defects which render it of little value, such as extreme verbosity. In the good group fall 19 per cent., in the fair group 57 per cent. and in the poor group 24 per cent. That is to say, neglecting such formal bagatelles as the split infinitive, and merging the details of purity, propriety and precision in the larger qualities, I find that fewer than one fifth of these authors write with clearness, method and force, and that almost one fourth of them do not write even clearly.

Into this evaluation there enters, of course, whatever weakness may reside in my individual judgment. I am sure, however, that the finding is not vitiated by prejudice or favoritism, conscious or unconscious; and in making the assignments to the three classes I gave every author the benefit of a doubt.

Of these men about 75 per cent. have had collegiate or university training; their almæ matres are our leading universities and schools of science. No fewer than twenty of them are now professors or instructors in such institutions of learning, and most of these fall in the fair class: their writing is not strong. In a few cases it is markedly weak; in other cases there is manifested an abundance of energy, but it is not under good control. In the good class there is at least one who is self-educated. Thus it appears that scientific and university life, with the

preparation in lower schools which this implies, does not insure good English.

If the results given seem somewhat depressing, let us take courage from the Frenchman who declared that 'it needs more delicate tact to be a great writer than a great thinker,' and inquire whether, after all, the condition presented is markedly exceptional.

It is probable that if any other large body of writers were similarly classified they would not make a much better showing. My evaluation, unlike that of the writers quoted, is of manuscripts as they are received from the authors. Literature of belletristic character, having little if any immediately practical or economic content, is necessarily dependent for existence upon its intrinsic merit and must be at least fair if it is accepted for publication. On the other hand, many abominably written scientific papers are so richly laden with the results of observation and experiment that they are given prompt publication-so prompt that they can receive but a modicum of editorial attention. That is to say, nearly everything written by men of science is published, whereas only the supposed cream of 'polite' productions is thus honored. If practically all that is written in the line of novels, of essays or of poetry were published, the 'poor' percentage would doubtless be higher than twenty-four.

Although, therefore, scientific writing, relatively considered, is not in a desperate plight, its condition is bad enough and is, I believe, susceptible of no little improvement. Recognizing that the able writer is born rather than made that the chief requisites are, as Herbert Spencer has said, a sense of logical dependence, constructive ingenuity, a good verbal memory and a sensitive ear, and that these qualities are largely innate I nevertheless believe that in many cases the ability is present but is never used; it lies dormant, and could be awakened and brought into service. What it needs is appreciation and utilization. "In England and Germany," says Lewes, 66 men who will spare no labor in research, grudge all labor in style; a morning is cheerfully devoted to verifying a quotation

by one who will not spare ten minutes to reconstruct a clumsy sentence; a reference is sought with ardor, an appropriate expression in lieu of the inexact phrase which first suggests itself does not seem worth seeking. What are we to say to a man who spends a quarter's income on a diamond pin which he sticks in a greasy cravat?" One can hardly escape the conviction that this criticism applies to America as well as to England and Germany.

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It is true that, according to the figures, a large majority 'write clearly, but clearness alone is not sufficient. Sentences and paragraphs may themselves be perfectly clear, but the ideas they clothe be so inconsequent if not inconsequential, that their total effect on the reader is weariness. Effective composition implies sequence and unity, symmetry and proportion. Vital writing, whether it be a sentence, a paragraph or a disquisition, is characterized by structure and integrity. Such are the famous paragraphs of Macaulay, whose 'astonishing power of arranging facts and bringing them to bear on any subject joined with a clear and vigorous style,' says McMaster, 'enabled him to produce historical scenes with a grouping, a finish and a splendor to which no other writer can approach'; such are the exquisite essays of Lowell, who added to the love of learning the love of expression'; and such are the philosophical dissertations of Herbert Spencer, whose power of presentation is remarkable. Schopenhauer classified authors into three kinds: "First," said he, come those who write without thinking. They write from a full memory, from reminiscences. This class is the most numerous. Then come those who do their thinking while they are writing, and there is no lack of them. Last of all come those writers who think before they begin to write; they are rare." If Addison's definition of good writing (a definition which was warmly endorsed by Hume)-that it consists in the expression of sentiments or ideas which are natural but not obvious-is valid, it is apparent why the productions of authors who fall in the first class are poor: the lucid statement of relations which are not obvious