they say, "scientific." You wince under that most offensive
epithet--and I am able to give you my intelligent sympathy--though
"pseudo-scientific" and "quasi-scientific" are worse by far for the
skin. You would begin to talk of scientific languages, of Esperanto,
La Langue Bleue, New Latin, Volapuk, and Lord Lytton, of the
philosophical language of Archbishop Whateley, Lady Welby's work
upon Significs and the like. You would tell me of the remarkable
precisions, the encyclopaedic quality of chemical terminology, and
at the word terminology I should insinuate a comment on that eminent
American biologist, Professor Mark Baldwin, who has carried the
language biological to such heights of expressive clearness as to be
triumphantly and invincibly unreadable. (Which foreshadows the line
of my defence.)

You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without
ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae, and with every term
in relations of exact logical consistency with every other. It will
be a language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and
all its constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable
from every other word in sound as well as spelling.

That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and if
only because the demand rests upon implications that reach far
beyond the region of language, it is worth considering here. It
implies, indeed, almost everything that we are endeavouring to
repudiate in this particular work. It implies that the whole
intellectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules of
logic, the systems of counting and measurement, the general
categories and schemes of resemblance and difference, are
established for the human mind for ever--blank Comte-ism, in fact,