all these criticisms of the human
mind? Does it follow that thought is futile and discussion vain? By no
means. Rather these considerations lead us toward mutual understanding.
They clear up the deadlocks that come from the hard and fast use of
terms, they establish mutual charity as an intellectual necessity.
The common way of speech and thought which the old system of logic has
simply systematized, is too glib and too presumptuous of certainty. We
must needs use language, but we must use it always with the thought in
our minds of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from
fact. All propositions are approximations to an elusive truth, and we
employ them as the mathematician studies the circle by supposing it to
be a polygon of a very great number of sides.

We must make use of terms and sometimes of provisional terms. But
we must guard against such terms and the mental danger of excessive
intension they carry with them. The child takes a stick and says it is
a sword and does not forget, he takes a shadow under the bed and says it
is a bear and he half forgets. The man takes a set of emotions and says
it is a God, and he gets excited and propagandist and does forget; he is
involved in disputes and confusions with the old gods of wood and stone,
and presently he is making his God a Great White Throne and fitting him
up with a mystical family.

Essentially we have to train our minds to think anew, if we are to think
beyond the purposes for which the mind seems to have been evolved. We
have to disabuse ourselves from the superstition of the binding nature
of definitions and the exactness of logic. We have to cure ourselves of
the natural tricks of common thought and argument. You know the way
of it, how effective and foolish it is; the quotation of the exact
statement of which every jot and tittle must be maintained, the
challenge to be consistent, the deadlock between your terms and mine.

More and more as I grow older and more settled in my views am I bored by
common argument, bored not because I am ceasing to be interested in
the things argued about, but because I see more and more clearly the
futility of the methods pursued.

How then are we to think and argue and what truth may we attain? Is not
the method of the scientific investigator a valid one, and is there not
truth to the world of fact in scientific laws? Decidedly there is. And
the continual revision and testing against fact that these laws g