in
concert, appealing to common arguments and experience, with perpetual
succession and a common seal, as the Queen says in the charter, is, be the
merit of the schism what it may, a thing wholly different from the case of
the isolated opponent in the mode of opposition to it which reason points
out.

During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been
gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become
_mathematical_. The question now is, not whether this or that hypothesis is
better or worse to the pure thought, but whether it accords with observed
phenomena in those consequences which can be shown necessarily to follow
from it, if it be true. Even in those sciences which are not yet under the
dominion of mathematics, and perhaps never will be, a working copy of the
mathematical process has been made. This is not known to the followers of
those sciences who are not themselves mathematicians and who very often
exalt their horns against the mathematics in consequence. They might as
well be squaring the circle, for any sense they show in this particular.

A great many individuals, ever since the rise of the mathematical method,
have, each for himself, attacked its direct and indirect consequences. I
shall not here stop to point out how the very accuracy of exact science
gives better aim than the preceding state of things could give. I shall
call each of these persons a _paradoxer_, and his system a _paradox_. I use
the word in the old sense: a paradox is something which is apart from
general opinion, either in subject-matter, method, or conclusion.

Many of the things brought forward would now be called _crotchets_, which
is the nearest word we have to old _paradox_. But there is this difference,
that by calling a thing a _crotchet_ we mean to speak lightly of it; which
was not the necessary sense of _paradox_. Thus in the sixteenth century
many spoke of the earth's motion as the _paradox of {3} Copernicus_, who
held the ingenuity of that theory in very high esteem, and some, I think,
who even inclined towards it. In the seventeenth century, the depravation
of meaning took place, in England at least. Phillips says _paradox_ is "a
thing which seemeth strange"--here is the old meaning: after a colon he
proceeds--"and absurd, and is contrary to common opinion," which is an
addition due to his own time.

Some of my readers are hardly inclined to think that the word _paradox_
could