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Instead, he should have referred to experience, common sense, and to farmers, sailors, and in fact to anyone who took his own perceptions seriously. Galileo, on the other hand, thought that the real was just mathematics converted into the concrete.
Instead, Galileo should have recognized that his mathematics could tell him only of an abstracted world in which there was no time flow, no voluminous space, no creative acts of becoming. What is real is the source of both their views—experienceable and scientific—neither of which has a place for the other.
Paul Weiss, Professor of Philosophy
Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.
Coining a Phrase
Your article "Journalese as a Second Tongue" [ESSAY, Feb. 6] is very good stuff. Obviously, space limitations prevented you from referring to that sort of political mission known as "fact finding." I went on such a mission once, found a fact, picked it up with tweezers, and now keep it in a cigar box in my garage in case there is ever any demand for it.
The phrase "between a rock and a hard place" is, to my knowledge, a ruralism. I first heard it in Arizona about 1940 and had the impression it had been in use long before that. Country sayings almost invariably have a much higher poetic component than their big-city equivalents. Some of these observations have become classics, like "nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rockin' chairs." One of my particular favorites is "as lonesome as a peanut in a boxcar."
Steve Allen Van Nuys, Calif.