Linguistic Theory and Language Description

The successful development of science requires a proper balance between the method of building up from observations and the method of deducing by pure reasoning from speculative assumptions...

There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.

I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems — forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right.