In the illustration of the definitions of lightning, there were three; the first was the most mistaken and its application brought the most harm; the second was less incorrect and the practical results less bad; the third under the present conditions of our knowledge, was the “true one” and it brought the maximum benefit. This lightning illustration suggests the important idea of _relative_ truth and _relative_ falsehood—the idea, that is, of degrees of truth and degrees of falsehood. A definition may be neither absolutely true nor absolutely false; but of two definitions of the same thing, one of them may be truer or falser than the other. If, for illustration’s sake, we call the first “truth” _A_, (alpha 1), the second one _A_2 (alpha 2), the third one _A_3 (alpha 3), we may suppose that a genius appears who has the faculty to surpass all the other relative truths _A_1, _A_2, _A_3, ... _A_n and gives us an absolute or final truth, VALID IN INFINITY (_A_infinity) say a final definition, that lightning is so ... and so ..., a kind of energy which flows, let us say, through a glass tube filled with charcoal. Then of course this definition would immediately make obvious what use could be made of it. We could erect glass towers filled with charcoal and so secure an unlimited flow of available free energy and our whole life would be affected in an untold degree. This example explains the importance of correct definitions. But to take another example: there is such a thing as a phenomenon called the “color” red. Imagine how it might be defined. A reactionary would call it a “Bolshevik” (_A_1); a Bolshevik would say “My color” (_A_2); a color-blind person would say “such a thing does not exist” (_A_3); a Daltonist would say “that is green” (_A_4); a metaphysician would say “that is the soul of whiskey” (_A_5); an historian would say “that is the color of the ink with which human history has been written” (_A_6); an uneducated person would say “that is the color of blood” (_A_7); the modern scientist would say “it is the light of such and such wave length” (_A_8). If this last definition be “valid in infinity” or not we do not know, but it is, nevertheless, a “scientific truth” in the present condition of our knowledge. This final but unknown “truth valid in infinity” is somehow perceived or felt by us as an ideal, for in countless years of observation we have formed a series of less and less false, more and more nearly true “ideas” about the phenomenon. The “ideas” are _reflexes_ of the phenomenon, reflected in our midst as in a mirror; the reflexes may be distorted, as in a convex or concave mirror, but they suggest an ideal reflex valid in infinity. It is of the utmost importance to realize that the words which are used to express the ideas and the ideals are THE MATERIALIZATION of the ideas and ideal; it is only by words that we are enabled to give to other human beings an exact or nearly exact impression which we have had of the phenomenon.