Such primitive acts of knowledge constitute to-day the solidest
foundation of scientific thought. Our instinctive knowledge, as we shall
briefly call it, by virtue of the conviction that we have consciously
and intentionally contributed nothing to its formation, confronts us
with an authority and logical power which consciously acquired knowledge
even from familiar sources and of easily tested fallibility can never
possess. All so-called axioms are such instinctive knowledge. Not
consciously gained knowledge alone, but powerful intellectual instinct,
joined with vast conceptive powers, constitute the great inquirer. The
greatest advances of science have always consisted in some successful
formulation, in clear, abstract, and communicable terms, of what was
instinctively known long before, and of thus making it the permanent
property of humanity. By Newton's principle of the equality of pressure
and counterpressure, whose truth all before him had felt, but which no
predecessor had abstractly formulated, mechanics was placed by a single
stroke on a higher level. Our statement might also be historically
justified by examples from the scientific labors of Stevinus, S. Carnot,
Faraday, J. R. Mayer, and others.
All this, however, is merely the soil from which science starts. The
first real beginnings of science appear in society, particularly in the
manual arts, where the necessity for the communication of experience
arises. Here, where some new discovery is to be described and related,
the compulsion is first felt of clearly defining in consciousness the
important and essential features of that discovery, as many writers can
testify. The aim of instruction is simply the saving of experience; the
labor of one man is made to take the place of that of another.
The most wonderful economy of communication is found in language. Words
are comparable to type, which spare the repetition of written signs and
thus serve a multitude of purposes; or to the few sounds of which our
numberless different words are composed. Language, with its helpmate,
conceptual thought, by fixing the essential and rejecting the
unessential, constructs its rigid pictures of the fluid world on the
plan of a mosaic, at a sacrifice of exactness and fidelity but with a
saving of tools and labor. Like a piano-player with previously prepared
sounds, a speaker excites in his listener thoughts previously prepared,
but fitting many cases, which respond to the speaker's summons with
alacrity and little effort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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