t they think is going to be useful their
knowledge will be partial and insufficient. I think it is to the
constant inculcation of this fact by experience, rather than to any
reasoning, that is due the continued appreciation of a liberal
education. Every business-man knows that a business-college training is
of very little account in enabling one to fight the battle of life, and
that college-bred men have a great advantage even in fields where mere
education is a secondary matter. We are accustomed to seeing ridicule
thrown upon the questions sometimes asked of candidates for the civil
service because the questions refer to subjects of which a knowledge is
not essential. The reply to all criticisms of this kind is that there
is no one quality which more certainly assures a man's usefulness to
society than the propensity to acquire useless knowledge. 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. Without intending any such slur, I may
still say that language and statements are worthy of the name
scientific as they approach this standard; and, moreover, that a great