Strike out from our sentences everything but nouns and verbs, and therestands displayed the vagueness characterizing undeveloped tongues. Each inflectionof a verb, or addition by which the case of a noun is marked, by limitingthe conditions of action or of existence, enables men to express their thoughtsmore precisely. That the application of an adjective to a noun, or an adverbto a verb narrows the class of things or changes indicated, implies thatthe additional word serves to make the proposition more distinct. And similarlywith other parts of speech.
The like effect results from the multiplication of words of each order.
When the names for objects, and acts, and qualities, are but few, the rangeof each is proportionately wide, and its meaning therefore unspecific. Thesimiles and metaphors so much used by aboriginal races, indirectly and imperfectlysuggest ideas which they cannot express directly and perfectly from lackof words. Or to take a case from ordinary life, if we compare the speechof the peasant who, out of his limited vocabulary, can describe the contentsof the bottle he carries, only as "doctor's stuff" which he hasgot for his "sick" wife, with the speech of the physician, whotells those educated like himself the particular composition of the medicineand the particular disorder for which he has prescribed it; we have vividlybrought home to us the precision which language gains by the multiplicationof terms.
Again, in the course of its evolution, each tongue acquires a furtheraccuracy through processes which fix the meaning of each word. Intellectualintercourse slowly diminishes laxity of expression. By-and-by dictionariesgive definitions. And eventually, among the most cultivated, indefinitenessis not tolerated, either in the terms used or in their grammatical combinations.
Once more, languages considered as wholes become more sharply marked offfrom one another, and from their common parent; as witness, in early times,the clear distinction that arose between the two connate languages Greekand Latin, and in later times the divergence of three Latin dialects intoItalian, French, and Spanish. §136. In his History of the Inductive Sciences, Dr. Whewellsays that the Greeks failed in physical philosophy because their "ideaswere not distinct, and appropriate to the facts." I do not quote thisremark for its luminousness; since it would be equally proper to ascribethe indistinctness and inappropriateness of their ideas to the imperfectionof their physical philosophy; but I quote it because it serves as good evidenceof the indefiniteness of primitive science. The same work and its fellow, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, yield other evidences equallygood, because equally independent of any such hypothesis as is here to beestablished. Respecting mathematics, we have the fact that geometrical theoremsgrew out of empirical methods; and that these theorems, at first isolated,did not acquire the clearness which demonstration gives, until they werearranged by Euclid into a series of dependent propositions. At a later period,the same general truth was exemplified in the progress from the "methodof exhaustions" and the "method of indivisibles" to the "methodof limits;" which is the central idea of the infinitesimal calculus. in early mechanics may be traced a dim perception that action and reactionare equal and opposite; though, for ages after, this truth remained unformulated.
And similarly, the property of inertia, though not distinctly comprehendeduntil Kepler lived, was vaguely recognized long before. "The conceptionof statical force," "was never presented in a distinct form tillthe works of Archimedes appeared;" and "the conception of acceleratingforce was confused, in the mind of Kepler and his contemporaries, and didnot become clear enough for purposes of sound scientific reasoning beforethe succeeding century." To which specific assertions may be added thegeneral remark, that "terms which originally, and before the laws ofmotion were fully known, were used in a very vague and fluctuating sense,were afterwards limited and rendered precise." When we turn from abstractscientific conceptions to the concrete previsions of science, of which astronomyfurnishes numerous examples, a like contrast is visible. The times at whichcelestial phenomena will occur, have been predicted with ever-increasingaccuracy. Errors once amounting to days are now diminished to seconds. Thecorrespondence between the real and supposed forms of orbits has been graduallyrendered more precise. Originally thought circular, then epicyclical, thenelliptical, orbits are now ascertained to be curves which always deviatefrom perfect ellipses, and are ever undergoing changes.
But the general advance of Science in definiteness is best shown by thecontrast between its qualitative stage and its quantitative stage. At firstthe facts ascertained were that between such and such phenomena some connexionexisted -- that the appearances a and b always occurred together or in succession;but it was known neither what was the nature of the relation between a andb, nor how much of a accompanied so much of b. The development of Sciencehas in part been the reduction of these vague connexions to distinct ones.
