EXERCISES

  1. Discover the restricting adjectives or phrases that will reduce the number of differentia required by the genus in the following definitions:
    1. Vaudeville is an entertainment.
    2. Pneumonia is a disease.
    3. The Browning gun is a machine.
    4. Landscape gardening is an occupation.
    5. Smelting is an operation.
    6. Lyrics are writing.
    7. A college diploma is a statement by a body of men.
    8. Rotation of crops is a system.
    9. The Republican party is an organization.
    10. Anglo-Saxon is a language.
    11. An axe is a tool.
    12. A printing press is a steel structure.
    13. A hair-net is weaving.
    14. Literature is writing.
    15. Militarism is an attitude of mind.
  2. Write a definition of any of the following, showing how the subject has shifted its genus by its development, as the clearing-house (page [75]) has.
    1. The Temperance Movement (sentimental crusade; sensible campaign for efficiency).
    2. War.
    3. Incantation (means of salvation; curiosity).
    4. Household Science (drudgery; occupation).
    5. Aristocracy (through physical strength; through birth; through property).
    6. Justice (B.C.; A.D.).
    7. Chemistry (magic; utility).
    8. The Presidency of the United States (as changed by Mr. Wilson's procedure with Congress).
    9. The Theater (under Puritan and Cavalier).
    10. Electricity (curiosity; fearsome thing; utility).
  3. Of course any one of these ten subjects can be defined with a changeless genus, but such a genus is likely to be in the realm of the abstract, pretty thoroughly divorced from practical life.
    1. Laziness is the state of being disinclined to action or exertion; averse to labor; indolent; idle; slothful.
    2. Efficiency is the quality of being efficient, of producing an effect or effects; efficient power or action.
    3. A department store is a store keeping a great variety of goods which are arranged in several departments, especially one with dry goods as the principal stock.
    4. Metabolism is the sum of the processes concerned in the building up of protoplasm and its destruction incidental to the manifestation of vital phenomena; the chemical changes proceeding continually in living cells, by which the energy is provided for the vital processes and activities and new material is assimilated to repair the waste.
    5. Judgment is the faculty of judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely; good sense; as, a man of judgment; a politician without judgment.
    6. Puddling is the art or process of converting cast iron into wrought iron, or, now rarely, steel by subjecting it to intense heat and frequent stirring in a reverberatory furnace in the presence of oxidizing substances, by which it is freed from a portion of its carbon and other impurities.
    7. Overhead cost is the general expenses of a business, as distinct from those caused by particular pieces of traffic.
    8. A joke is something said or done for the sake of exciting a laugh; something witty or sportive (commonly indicating more of hilarity or humor than jest).
    9. A diplomat is one employed or skilled in the art and practice of conducting negotiations between nations, as in arranging treaties; performing the business or art of conducting international discourse.
    10. A visionary is one who relies, or tends to rely, on visions, or impractical ideas, projects, or the like; an impractical person.
    11. An entrepreneur is an employer in his character of one who assumes the risk and management of business.
    12. Loyalty is fidelity to a superior, or to duty, love, etc.
    13. A prig is one narrowly and self-consciously engrossed in his own mental or spiritual attainments; one guilty of moral or intellectual foppery; a conceited precisian.
    14. Heresy is an opinion held in opposition to the established or commonly received doctrine, and tending to promote division or dissension.
    15. Eugenics is the science of improving stock, whether human or animal, or of improving plants.
  4. From the following definitions taken from Webster's New International Dictionary construct definitions of a more amplified, pleasing nature, after the manner of the definition of war correspondents.
    1. Literature.
    2. Living wage.
    3. Capillary attraction.
    4. Sympathy.
    5. Classicism.
    6. Inertia.
    7. Fodder.
    8. Religion.
    9. Introspection.
    10. Individuality.
    11. Finance.
    12. Capital.
    13. Soil physics.
    14. Progress.
    15. Narrow-mindedness.
  5. Compare the definitions of the following which you find in the Century Dictionary, the Standard Dictionary, the Webster's New International Dictionary and the New English Dictionary; find the common elements, and make a definition of your own.
  6. Look up the definitions of the following terms and estimate the resulting amount of increase in your knowledge of the subject which includes the terms. Do you find any stimulus toward thinking about the subject? What would you say, as the result of this investigation, about the value of definitions? What does Coleridge mean by his statement "Language thinks for us"?
    1. Beauty is its own excuse for being.
    2. Virtue is its own reward.
  7. 1. Religion:
  8. awe, reverence, duty, mystery, peace, priest, worship, loyalty, prayer, supplication, trust, divinity, god, service, church, temple, heaven, fate.
  9. 2. Socialism:
    1. In view of the fact that Gissing uses so slight an illustration to fix his ideal, what makes the definition valuable? Compare the value of this definition with another of the same subject such as you might find in a text on Sociology or Economics.
    2. Define by illustration any of the following: Homesickness, Jealousy, Despair, Discouragement, Vulgarity, Opulence, Misery, Cheapness, Tenacity, Anger, Adaptability, Man of action, Man of executive ability, Statesman, Ward boss, Man of learning, Luck, Courage, Business success, "Bonehead Play," Political shrewdness, The "College Widow," Perfect technique, Up-to-date factory, Social tact, A Snob, "Some Kid," Other-worldliness, A Gentleman, A Lady, A "real meal," A fighting chance, Good breeding, A "Social climber," Community music, Poetic justice, A wage-slave, A political ring, Good team-work, Elasticity of mind, Bigotry.
    3. How far is definition by illustration concerned with morality? Could you, for example, so illustrate courage as to seem to exclude a really courageous person? What necessity in employing this method does your answer to the preceding question indicate?
    4. Define any of the following: The ideal leader of the "gang," The ideal ward boss, The ideal town librarian, The ideal teacher, The ideal military general, captain, corporal, The ideal headwaiter, The ideal foreman in a factory, The ideal soda-clerk, The ideal athletic coach, The ideal intellectual leader, The ideal orchestra conductor, The ideal mayor, The ideal "boss" in a steel mill, on a farm, of an engineering gang, of cotton pickers, of lumberjacks.
    5. Is the definition of a Responsible Statesman any the less sound because the differentia are duties rather than facts? Write a theme explaining why an executive too far "ahead of his times" fails of immediate results.
    6. In the manner of the definition of Amortization, write a definition of the following: Collective buying, Sabotage, Montessori method of education, Dry cleaning, Dry farming.
  10. property, social classes, economic rights, capital, labor, wages, the masses, aristocracy, envy, self-respect, economic distribution, labor union, boycott, strike, lock-out, materialism, profit-sharing.
  11. 3. Ability:
    1. Autocracy and Democracy.
    2. Fame and Notoriety.
    3. Cribbing and Lying.
    4. Immorality and Unconventionality.
    5. Musician and Music Lover.
    6. Popularity and Cheapness.
    7. Enthusiast and Crank.
    8. An Irish Bull and a Paradox.
    9. Puppy Love and Real Love.
    10. Boiling and Broiling.
    11. Honesty and Truthfulness.
    12. White Lies and Falsehoods.
    13. Liberty and License.
    14. Wages and Unearned Increment.
    15. Knowledge and Scholarship.
    16. Religion and Superstition.
    17. Broadmindedness and Spinelessness.
    18. Architecture and Architectural Engineering.
    19. Socialism and Anarchy.
    20. Wit and Humor.
    21. Enough and Sufficient.
    22. Genetic Heredity and Social Heredity.
    23. Lying and Diplomacy.
    24. Theology and Religion.
    25. Force, Energy, and Power.
    26. Sanitary Engineers and Plumbers.
    27. Business, Trade, and Commerce.
    28. "Kidding" and Taunting.
    29. Eminence and Prominence.
    30. Realism and Romanticism.
    31. Kinetic and Potential Energy.
    32. Popular and Permanent Literature.
    33. A "Gentleman Farmer" and a Producer.
    34. An Employer and a Slave-driver.
    35. A Practical Joke and a "Mean Trick."
  12. genius, wit, talent, insight, judgment, perseverance, logic, imagination, originality, intellectuality, vitality.
    1. The scholarly atmosphere of a university.
    2. The business atmosphere of the Stock Exchange.
    3. The holy atmosphere of a large church.
    4. The inhuman atmosphere of an ordinary criminal court.
    5. The human atmosphere of a reunion (of a class, a family, a group of friends).
    6. The majestic atmosphere of Niagara Falls.
    7. The beautiful atmosphere of a pond of skaters.
    8. The
    9. The calm atmosphere of a dairy farm.
  13. 4. Music:
  14. sound, rhythm, melody, harmony, orchestra, interval (musical), key, beat, tonic, modulation, musical register, polyphony, monophony, sonata, oratorio, musical scale, diatonic, chromatic, tempo.
  15. 5. Democracy:
    1. Life is one long process of getting tired.
    2. Life is the distribution of an error—or errors.
    3. Life is eight parts cards and two parts play; the unseen world is made manifest to us in the play.
    4. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
    5. The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan and the whole fixed upon stilts.
    6. Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.
    7. Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of both.
    8. Going to your doctor is having such a row with your cells that you refer them to your solicitor. Sometimes you, as it were, strike against them and stop their food, when they go on strike against yourself. Sometimes you file a bill in chancery against them and go to bed.[33]
  16. independence, suffrage, representation, equality, popular, coöperation.
  17. Are the two statements which follow definitions? If not, why not? What would be the effect of the use of definitions of this type in argument? Write a defining theme with such a definition as its nucleus, and test its value.
  18. In the following definitions[26] what are the genera? Are the definitions fair? How would you criticize them in general? Write a theme using the differentia noted, and trying to catch in the theme the spirit that is shown in the lists.
  19. Highbrow: Browning, anthropology, economics, Bacon, the up-lift, inherent sin, Gibbon, fourth dimension, Euripides, "eyether," pâté de fois gras, lemon phosphate, Henry Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson.
  20. Low-highbrow: Municipal government, Kipling, socialism, Shakespeare, politics, Thackeray, taxation, golf, grand opera, bridge, chicken à la Maryland, "eether," stocks and bonds, gin rickey, Theodore Roosevelt, chewing gum in private.
  21. High-lowbrow: Musical comedy, euchre, baseball, moving pictures, small steak medium, whiskey, Robert W. Chambers, purple socks, chewing gum with friends.
  22. Lowbrow: Laura Jean Libbey, ham sandwich, haven't came, pitch, I and her, melodrama, hair oil, the Duchess, beer, George M. Cohan, red flannels, toothpicks, Bathhouse John, chewing gum in public.
  23. Expand the following definition[27] into a theme, using the combined methods of illustration and comparison. What is the value of having the heart of the definition stated before the theme is begun?
  24. The worthy artist or craftsman is he who serves the physical and moral senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays, and dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable activity. The great artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.
  25. See "Poverty" (page [84]).
  26. What is the chief value of the following selection as a real definition? Which is of greater value, this selection or the kind of definition that would be found in a text on geography?
  27. Define, in a manner similar to that of the selection: New England, The Middle West, The "Old Dominion," "The Cradle of Liberty," "Gotham," The "Gold Coast," "Dixie," "The Old South," "The Auld Sod," "The Corn Belt," "The Wheat Belt," The Anthracite Region, The Land of Big Game, "The Land of Heart's Desire," "The Cockpit of Europe," "The Vacation Land."
  28. Between the Seine and the Rhine lay once a beautiful land wherein more history was made, and recorded in old monuments full of grace and grandeur and fancy, than in almost any other region of the world. The old names were best, for each aroused memory and begot strange dreams: Flanders, Brabant, the Palatinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne, Franche-Comté; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the town names ring with the same sonorous melody, evoking the ghosts of a great and indelible past: Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Liége; Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblenz, and Trêves; Ypres and Lille, Tournai and Fontenoy, Arras and Malplaquet; Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and Varennes; Amiens, Soissons, and Reims. Cæsar, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders, and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights, and aureoled saints take form and shape again at the clang of the splendid names.
  29. It is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three hundred and fifty miles, perhaps, from the Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years following the fall of Rome, this little country—or the men that made it great—was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual energy of the Holy See, and with a varying and sometimes negligible influence from the Teutonic lands beyond the Rhine, and you have the mainsprings of mediævalism, even though for its full manifestation you must take into account the men in the far countries of the Italian peninsula and the Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Saxony, Bohemia.[28]
  30. Note the two selections that follow, in comparison with the definitions of a responsible statesman and quack novels on pages [87] and [88], and write a definition of any of the following groups, using the method of comparison and contrast.
  31. A sale of personal property is the transfer of its general ownership from one person to another for a price in money. It is almost always the result of a contract between the seller and the buyer. If the contract provides for the transfer of ownership at once the transaction is called "a present sale," or "a bargain and sale," or "an executed contract of sale." If it provides for the transfer of ownership at some future time it is called "a contract to sell," or "an executory contract of sale."
  32. The business transaction most nearly resembling a sale is that of barter, or the transfer of one article of personal property for another, as when A and B trade horses, or wagons, or oats, or cows. It differs from a sale only in this, that the consideration for each transfer is the counter-transfer of a chattel instead of money. Next to barter in its likeness to sale is a mortgage of personal property, usually called a chattel mortgage. This, in form, is a sale, but it contains a proviso that if the mortgagor pays a certain amount of money, or does some other act, at a stipulated time, the sale shall be void. Even though the mortgagor does not perform the act promised at the agreed time, he still has the right to redeem the property from the mortgage by paying his debt with interest. In other words, a chattel mortgage does not transfer general ownership, or absolute property in the chattels, while a sale does.
  33. A sale differs from a bailment.... The former is the transfer of title to goods, the latter of their possession. A bailee undertakes to restore to the bailor the very thing bailed, although it may be in a changed form, while the buyer is to pay money to the seller for the subject-matter of their contract.[29]
  34. The familiar distinction between the poetic and the scientific temper is another way of stating the same difference. The one fuses or crystallizes external objects and circumstances in the medium of human feeling and passion; the other is concerned with the relations of objects and circumstances among themselves, including in them all the facts of human consciousness, and with the discovery and classification of these relations. There is, too, a corresponding distinction between the aspects which conduct, character, social movement, and the objects of nature are able to present, according as we scrutinize them with a view to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which they make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility, our tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet. The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world, the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly monsters, down to "the meanest flower that blows," all these are clothed with one set of attributes by scientific intelligence, and with another by sentiment, fancy, and imaginative association.[30]
  35. Is the following selection properly a definition by the method of comparison? What is defined? Are the general statements that serve as background true? In how far does the whole selection depend for its validity upon the truth of these general statements?
  36. There is a difference between boys and men, but it is a difference of self-knowledge chiefly. A boy wants to do everything because he does not know he cannot; a man wants to do something because he knows he cannot do everything; a boy always fails, and a man sometimes succeeds because the man knows and the boy does not know. A man is better than a boy because he knows better; he has learned by experience that what is a harm to others is a greater harm to himself, and he would rather not do it. But a boy hardly knows what harm is, and he does it mostly without realizing that it hurts. He cannot invent anything, he can only imitate; and it is easier to imitate evil than good. You can imitate war, but how are you going to imitate peace? So a boy passes his leisure in contriving mischief. If you get another fellow to walk into a wasp's camp, you can see him jump and hear him howl, but if you do not, then nothing at all happens. If you set a dog to chase a cat up a tree, then something has been done; but if you do not set the dog on the cat, then the cat just lies in the sun and sleeps and you lose your time. If a boy could find out some way of doing good, so that he could be active in it, very likely he would want to do good now and then; but as he cannot, he very seldom wants to do good.[31]
  37. Does the style of the definition of moral atmosphere (page [9]) fit well with the subject? Would the definition be more effective if written in a more formal style?
  38. Define:
  39. {
  40. inspiring
    overpowering
    brutal
    beautiful
  41. }
  42. atmosphere of a steel mill.
  43. Does the following selection serve to define honor as too difficult of attainment, as too closely bound up with fighting? Is any definition of privilege implied? Define honor as taught in a college and honor as taught in the business world. Can a State University afford to maintain the kind of honor that forces it to "remain loyal to unpopular causes and painful truths"? Is the honor that seeks "to maintain faith even with the devil" foolish? Write a report on the state of honor in your college or university such as Washington or Lincoln would have written after investigating conditions in the student politics of the institution, or conditions in examinations and quizzes.
  44. Honor, perhaps because it is associated in the public mind with old ideas of dueling and paying gambling debts, and in general with the habits, good and bad, of a privileged class, is not in high repute with a modern industrial community, where bankruptcy laws, the letter of the statute book, the current morality of an easy-going, good-natured, success-loving people, mark out a smoother path. But the business of a college is not to fit a boy for the world, but to fit him to mould the world to his ideal. Honor is not necessarily old-fashioned and antiquated; it will adapt itself to the present and to the future. If it is arbitrary, or at least has an arbitrary element, so are most codes of law. If honor belongs to a privileged class, it is because it makes a privileged class; a body of men whose privilege it is to speak out in the scorn of consequence, to keep an oath to their own hurt, to remain loyal to unpopular causes and painful truths, to maintain faith even with the devil, and not swerve for rewards, prizes, popularity, or any of the blandishments of success. Because it is arbitrary, because it has rules, it needs to be taught. To teach a code of honor is one of the main purposes of education; a college cannot say, "We teach academic studies," and throw the responsibility for honor on parents, on preliminary schools, on undergraduate opinion, on each boy's conscience. Honor is taught by the companionship, the standards, the ideals, the talk, the actions of honorable men; it is taught by honoring honorable failure and turning the back on all manner of dishonorable success.[32]
  46. Define, by showing the origin, any of the following:
  47. Highway Engineering, The County Agricultural Adviser, Customs Officer, A private secretary, The linotype machine, National public opinion, The Federal Reserve Board, The "Spoils System," The American Federation of Labor, American "Moral Leadership" in 1918, The Caste System, The mechanical stoker, The canal lock, The trial balance sheet, The Babcock Test.
  48. Are the following statements true definitions? Wherein does their worth consist? What causes any weakness that they may have?
  49. In the light of the following definition of Superiority of Status write a definition of any of the following: Superiority of birth, Superiority of training, Superiority of vitality, Superiority of environment, Superiority of patronage.
  50. There is another sort of artificial superiority which also returns an artificial rent: the superiority of pure status. What are called "superiors" are just as necessary in social organization as a keystone is in an arch; but the keystone is made of no better material than any other parts of a bridge; its importance is conferred upon it by its position, not its position by its importance. If half-a-dozen men are cast adrift in a sailing-boat, they will need a captain. It seems simple enough for them to choose the ablest man; but there may easily be no ablest man. The whole six, or four out of the six, or two out of the six, may be apparently equally fit for the post. In that case, the captain must be elected by lot; but the moment he assumes his authority, that authority makes him at once literally the ablest man in the boat. He has the powers which the other five have given him for their own good. Take another instance. Napoleon gained the command of the French army because he was the ablest general in France. But suppose every individual in the French army had been a Napoleon also! None the less a commander-in-chief, with his whole hierarchy of subalterns, would have had to be appointed—by lot if you like—and here, again, from the moment the lot was cast, the particular Napoleon who drew the straw for the commander-in-chief would have been the great, the all-powerful Napoleon, much more able than the Napoleons who were corporals and privates. After a year, the difference in ability between the men who had been doing nothing but sentry duty, under no strain of responsibility, and the man who had been commanding the army would have been enormous. As "the defenders of the system of Conservatism" well know, we have for centuries made able men out of ordinary ones by allowing them to inherit exceptional power and status; and the success of the plan in the phase of social development to which it was proper was due to the fact that, provided the favored man was really an ordinary man, and not a duffer, the extraordinary power conferred on him did effectually create extraordinary ability as compared with that of an agricultural laborer, for example, of equal natural endowments. The gentleman, the lord, the king, all discharging social functions of which the laborer is incapable, are products as artificial as queen bees. Their superiority is produced by giving them a superior status, just as the inferiority of the laborer is produced by giving him an inferior status. But the superior income which is the appanage of superior status is not rent of ability. It is a payment made to a man to exercise normal ability, in an abnormal situation. Rent of ability is what a man gets by exercising abnormal ability in a normal situation.[34]
  51. In the following selection how many definitions occur, or how many things are defined? Do you understand what the author says? How many words do you have to look up in the dictionary before you understand the article? Could the author have made the subject clear in a sensible extent of space?
  52. What would you say is the chief virtue of the selection? How is it gained? For what kind of audience was the article written? What was the author's controlling purpose? Point out how he attains it.
  53. Do you find any pattern-designers among novelists, poets, architects, landscape gardeners? Name a novel, a poem, a building, a park, which is primarily a pattern-design. Name one which is not a pattern-design so much as a dramatic expression. Which is the more significant? Which is more difficult to make?
  54. Define: Futurist painting, Free verse, Social morality, in relation to their preceding forms. Explain, through definition, the controversy between Paganism and Christianity, between Monarchy and Democracy, between Classical Education and Industrial Education, between Party Politics and Independent Politics, between Established Religion and Non-Conformist Views.
  55. Music is like drawing, in that it can be purely decorative, or purely dramatic, or anything between the two.... You can compose a graceful, symmetrical sound-pattern that exists solely for the sake of its own grace and symmetry. Or you can compose music to heighten the expression of human emotion; and such music will be intensely affecting in the presence of that emotion, and utter nonsense apart from it. For examples of pure pattern-designing in music I should have to go back to the old music of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries ... designed to affect the hearer solely by its beauty of sound and grace and ingenuity of pattern; absolute music, represented to-day in the formal sonata and symphony....
  56. The first modern dramatic composers accepted as binding the rules of good pattern-designing in sound; and this absurdity was made to appear practicable from the fact that Mozart had such an extraordinary command of his art that his operas contain numbers which, though they seem to follow the dramatic play of emotion and character, without reference to any other consideration whatever, are seen, upon examining them from the point of view of the absolute musician, to be perfectly symmetrical sound-patterns.... Even Mozart himself broke away in all directions, and was violently attacked by his contemporaries for doing so, the accusations levelled at him being exactly those with which the opponents of Wagner so often pester ourselves. Wagner completed the emancipation of the dramatic musician from these laws of pattern-designing; and we now have operas, and very good ones, too, written by composers not musicians in the old sense at all: that is, they are not pattern-designers; they do not compose music apart from drama.
  57. The dramatic development also touched purely instrumental music. Liszt tried hard to extricate himself from pianoforte arabesques, and become a tone poet like his friend Wagner. He wanted his symphonic poems to express emotions and their development. And he defined the emotion by connecting it with some known story, poem, or even picture: Mazeppa, Victor Hugo's Les Preludes, Kaulbach's Die Hunnenschlacht, or the like. But the moment you try to make an instrumental composition follow a story, you are forced to abandon the decorative pattern forms, since all patterns consist of some form which is repeated over and over again, and which generally consists in itself of a repetition of two similar halves. For example, if you take a playing-card (say the five of diamonds) as a simple example of pattern, you find not only that the diamond pattern is repeated five times, but that each established form of a symphony is essentially a pattern form involving just such symmetrical repetitions; and, since a story does not repeat itself, but pursues a continuous chain of fresh incident and correspondingly varied emotions, Liszt invented the symphonic poem, a perfectly simple and fitting common-sense form for his purpose, and one which makes Les Preludes much plainer sailing for the ordinary hearer than Mendelssohn's Melusine overture or Raff's Lenore or Im Walde symphonies, in both of which the formal repetitions would stamp Raff as a madman if we did not know that they were mere superstitions.[35]
Literature. Living wage. Capillary attraction. Sympathy. Classicism. Inertia. Fodder. Religion. Introspection. Individuality. Finance. Capital. Soil physics. Progress. Narrow-mindedness.
1. Religion: awe, reverence, duty, mystery, peace, priest, worship, loyalty, prayer, supplication, trust, divinity, god, service, church, temple, heaven, fate.
2. Socialism: property, social classes, economic rights, capital, labor, wages, the masses, aristocracy, envy, self-respect, economic distribution, labor union, boycott, strike, lock-out, materialism, profit-sharing.
3. Ability: genius, wit, talent, insight, judgment, perseverance, logic, imagination, originality, intellectuality, vitality.
4. Music: sound, rhythm, melody, harmony, orchestra, interval (musical), key, beat, tonic, modulation, musical register, polyphony, monophony, sonata, oratorio, musical scale, diatonic, chromatic, tempo.
5. Democracy: independence, suffrage, representation, equality, popular, coöperation.
  1. The scholarly atmosphere of a university.
  2. The business atmosphere of the Stock Exchange.
  3. The holy atmosphere of a large church.
  4. The inhuman atmosphere of an ordinary criminal court.
  5. The human atmosphere of a reunion (of a class, a family, a group of friends).
  6. The majestic atmosphere of Niagara Falls.
  7. The beautiful atmosphere of a pond of skaters.
  1. The
{inspiring
overpowering
brutal
beautiful		}atmosphere of a steel mill.
  1. The calm atmosphere of a dairy farm.

[CHAPTER IV]
ANALYSIS

Suppose that the president of a railroad asked you to report on the feasibility of a proposed line through a range of hills; or that you found it necessary to prove to an over-conservative farmer that he should erect a hollow-tile silo at once; or that your duty as chairman of the town playground committee led you to examine an empty lot for its possibilities; or that, as an expert in finance, you were trying to learn the cause of the deficit in a country club's accounts. In the first case you would examine the proposed route for its practicability, would estimate the grades to be reduced, would look into the question of drainage, would consider the possibility of landslides, would survey the quality of the road-bed: all with a view to making a complete report on the practicability of the route proposed. In the other cases you would determine the conditions in general that you confronted, would answer the questions: what is the value of a hollow-tile silo? why is this site suitable for a playground? what is wrong with the finances of this club? Such tasks as these occur in life all the time; in college they confront one whenever an inconsiderate instructor asks for a term paper on, say, "Conditions in New York that Made the Tweed Ring Possible," or "The Influence of the Great War on Dyestuffs," or "Tennyson's Early Training as an Influence on his Poetry," or some other subject. In every one of these cases the writer who attempts to answer the questions involved is writing analysis, for Analysis is the breaking up of a subject into its component parts, seeing of what it is composed.

In every such case you would wish, first of all, to tell the truth. Of what use would your analysis be if you incorrectly estimated the drainage of the proposed railway route and the company had to expend thousands of dollars in fighting improper seepage? Unless the analysis was accurate, it would be useless or worse. But suppose that you told the truth about the site for the playground, its central position, its wealth of shade, its proper soil conditions, and yet forgot to take into account the sluggish, noisome stream that flowed on one side of the plot and bred disease? Your report would be valueless because it would be, in a vital point, quite lacking. In other words, it would be incomplete. For practical purposes it would therefore, of course, be untrue.

If you wish to write an analysis, then, your path is straight, and it leads between the two virtues of truth and thoroughness. Your catechism should be: Have I hugged my fact close and told the truth about it?, and, Have I really covered the ground?

The question of truth enters into every analysis; none may falsify. Completeness, on the other hand, is a more relative matter. In the report of a tariff commission it is essential; all the ground must be covered. In a thorough survey of Beethoven's music no sonata or quartette may be omitted. In determining the causes of an epidemic no clue is to be left unexamined until all possibilities have been exhausted. In the case of the term paper mentioned above, on the other hand, "Tennyson's Early Training as an Influence on his Poetry," not everything in his early life can be considered in anything short of a volume. In such a case you may well be puzzled what to do until you are suddenly cheered by the thought that your task is primarily one of interpretation, that what you are seeking is the spirit of the training. There would seem, therefore, to be various degrees of completeness in analysis. On the basis of completeness, then, we may divide analysis into the two classes of the Formal and the Informal.