Furthermore, the term “science” like “progress” seems to satisfy a primal need. Man feels lost without a touchstone of knowledge just as he feels lost without the direction-finder provided by progress. It is curious to note that actually the word is only another name for knowledge (L. _scientia_), so that if we should go by strict etymology, we should insist that the expression “science knows” (_i.e._, “knowledge knows”) is pure tautology. But our rhetoric seems to get around this by implying that science is _the_ knowledge. Other knowledges may contain elements of quackery, and may reflect the selfish aims of the knower; but “science,” once we have given the word its incorporation, is the undiluted essence of knowledge. The word as it comes to us then is a little pathetic in its appeal, inasmuch as it reflects the deeply human feeling that somewhere somehow there must be people who know things “as they are.” Once God or his ministry was the depository of such knowledge, but now, with the general decay of religious faith, it is the scientists who must speak _ex cathedra_, whether they wish to or not. The term “modern” shares in the rhetorical forces of the others thus far discussed, and stands not far below the top. Its place in the general ordering is intelligible through the same history. Where progress is real, there is a natural presumption that the latest will be the best. Hence it is generally thought that to describe anything as “modern” is to credit it with all the improvements which have been made up to now. Then by a transference the term is applied to realms where valuation is, or ought to be, of a different source. In consequence, we have “modern living” urged upon us as an ideal; “the modern mind” is mentioned as something superior to previous minds; sometimes the modifier stands alone as an epithet of approval: “to become modern” or “to sound modern” are expressions that carry valuation. It is of course idle not to expect an age to feel that some of its ways and habits of mind are the best; but the extensive transformations of the past hundred years seem to have given “modern” a much more decisive meaning. It is as if a difference of degree had changed into a difference of kind. But the very fact that a word is not used very analytically may increase its rhetorical potency, as we shall see later in connection with a special group of terms.