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He had been the dupe of the old word-jugglery which was forever confounding fact and fancy in men's minds. For it was essentially an age of words: the world was drunk with them, as it had once been drunk with action; and the former was the deadlier drug of the two. He looked about him languidly, letting the facts of life filter slowly through his faculties.
Where Herr Duehring only sees word-jugglery a more real content is brought to light by the newer point of view. Finally, even the Rousseau doctrine of equality, of which that of Herr Duehring is only a feeble and false plagiarism, has no existence unless the Hegelian negation of the negation serve it as a midwife, although it originated twenty years prior to the birth of Hegel.
If we are not to be misled by mere word-jugglery, we shall recognize the founder of the atomic theory of matter in Anaxagoras; its expositors along slightly different lines in Leucippus and Democritus; its re-discoverer of the nineteenth century in Dalton.
He charged them with word-jugglery, with reasoning from words to theory instead of from facts to theory. At this they were aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of reasoning to start with facts and to give names to the facts. When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded him that all good little German philosophies when they died went to Oxford.
Whatever the allurement of such reasoning, we must for the purpose of science let words have a specific meaning, nor must we let a mere word-jugglery blind us to the evidence of facts. That was the rock on which Greek science foundered; it is the rock which the modern helmsman sometimes finds it difficult to avoid.
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