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The most exact estimation possible of a political problem may have been contrived when a group of men, differing in origin, education, and mental type, first establish an approximate agreement as to the probable results of a series of possible political alternatives involving, say, increasing or decreasing state interference, and then discover the point where their 'liking' turns into 'disliking. Man is the measure of man, and he may still be using a quantitative process even though he chooses in each case that method of measurement which is least affected by the imperfection of his powers.
For thermometrical measurement is in actual fact never anything else than a recording of the movement of the indicator from one level to another. We choose merely to take a certain temperature level that of melting ice or something else as a fixed point of reference and mark it once for all on the instrument.
He says he has done it by actual measurement; and I hear from a private source that he uses a disc of twelve inches diameter which he rolls upon a straight rail. The 'rolling is a very creditable one; it is as much below the mark as Archimedes was above it.
It is then coiled on a frame and its rate of discharge measured by the electroscope. The radio-activity of the various rocks of our neighbourhood; this by direct measurement of the rock. The conductivity of the air, that is, the relative movement of ions in the air; by movement of air past charged surface.
I have seen a man in the Cavendish laboratory attempt to make a magnetic measurement in the immediate vicinity of some large iron pipes, and neither of us could tell the cause which made the apparatus behave so unreasonably. And prayers are often hindered in a similar way by unobserved disturbing causes. St. James supplies us with several hints:
Quality and Quantity were then first recognized as the primary features to be observed in scientific inquiry. As science has been developed, the domain of quantity has everywhere encroached on that of quality, till the process of scientific inquiry seems to have become simply the measurement and registration of quantities, combined with a mathematical discussion of the numbers thus obtained.
It comes from the Sanscrit root MN, which, in all its derivatives, conveys the idea of Measurement, as in the word Mind, through the Latin mens, the faculty which compares things and estimates them accordingly; Moon, the heavenly body whose phases afford the most obvious standard for the periodical measurement of time; Month, the period thus measured; "Man," the largest of the Indian weights; and so on.
The sects of the early ages have so totally died away that we hardly recall the meaning of their names, or determine their essential dogmas. From fasting, penance, and the gift of money, things which are of precise measurement, and therefore well suited to intellectual infancy, there may be perceived an advancing orthodoxy up to the highest metaphysical ideas.
Geometry for the Greek was something more than the art of land measurement, astronomy something more than a means of regulating the calendar or foretelling an eclipse. It was a study of the nature of the heavens, an attempt to penetrate the construction of the material universe. So with geometry.
SENT ... PROSINT: the line is given as Ribbeck prints it. He scans it as a 'bacchius', consisting of four feet, with the measurement | v |, the last syllable of saeclo seeming to be shortened. Saeclo = 'generation'. For mood of prosint see A 317; G. 632, H. 497, I. STATIUS NOSTER: 'our fellow-countryman Statius'. So Arch. 22 Ennius noster.
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