468 FERDINAND TONNIES : 63. We will therefore direct our inquiry exclusively to the causes of that obscurity and confusion, so that we may then consider the means for improving such an undesirable state. 64. The essential causes will be contained partly in general obstacles, partly in the historical conditions upon which the position and activity of these sciences are based. But these are of many kinds. We must here represent them as they appear to us for the estimation of this causality in their sharpest form. 65. (1) But we must first maintain that not only at the present time, but long ago, these causes have been noted ,. and this condition lamented. Even if we disregard voices from antiquity, yet since the renewal of the sciences a whole series of prominent thinkers have pointed out the evils of an obscure terminology and investigated the causes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there prevailed among free thinkers the conviction that the whole traditional pursuit of philosophy at the universities Scholastic was worthless. It seemed to them that an empty science of words was taught ; and that an elaborate terminology was a covering for ignorance and superstition. Technical words and subtle distinctions they despised. They declared their resolution of shaking off this whole inheritance, in order to penetrate immediately to things themselves. The book of nature alone was held worthy of reading ; either they desired, like Bacon, to rise from particular experiences to' generalisations, or like Galileo they declared that the book of nature was written in geometrical figures, and that who would understand it must learn the language of triangles and squares. 66. But the mathematical tendency far exceeded the induc- tive in content and influence ; it founded modern philosophy. Now in so far as this tendency set before itself the scientific problem of explaining nature, was indeed primarily physics, it was really greatly aided by the elaborate sign-language of geometrical figures, of arithmetic, and soon also of algebra. The international understanding of the great theorems which hold the ground in that region still depends upon the instrument of mathematical formulae. In later times again Chemistry, which is essentially grounded upon induction and experiment, has elaborated its own peculiar language of. formulae. But even that which in Physics and Chemistry goes beyond formulae has from a terminological point of view caused little difficulty. This fortunate result is largely due to the fact that in the terminology no one has sought for novelties ; and this again may be ascribed to the circum-
