still quite fashionable to talk not merely as if a 'character' were,
like a house or an orchard, a _thing_ which can be transferred bodily
from the possession of a parent to the possession of the offspring, but
even as though an 'heir' could 'inherit' himself.)

This last remark leads me to a further consideration. Science and
Philosophy are alike created by the simple determination to be
_thorough_ in our thinking about the problems which all things and
events present to us, to use no terms whose meaning is ambiguous, to
assert no propositions as true until we are satisfied that they are
either directly apprehended as true, or strictly deducible from other
propositions which are thus apprehended. But now that the area of facts
open to our exploration has become far too vast for a modern Francis
Bacon to 'take all knowledge for his province', and convenience has led
to the distinction between the philosopher and the man of science, a
_practical_ distinction between the two makes its appearance. It is
_convenient_ that our knowledge of detail should be steadily extended by
considering the consequences which follow from a given set of postulates
without waiting for the solution of the more strictly philosophical
questions whether our postulates have been reduced to the simplest and
most unambiguous expression, whether the list might not be curtailed by
showing that some of its members which have been accepted on their own
merits can be deduced from the rest, or again enlarged by the express
addition of principles which we have all along been using without any
actual formulation of them. The point may be illustrated by considering
the set of 'postulates' explicitly made in the geometry of Euclid. We
cannot be said to have made geometry thoroughly scientific until we know
whether the traditional list of postulates is complete, whether some of
the traditional postulates might not be capable of demonstration, and
whether geometry as a science would be destroyed by the denial of one or