so to speak—­takes the job himself and leaves the disease nothing to do.  The allopath travels around a race-track in the opposite direction from the disease, and thwarts it through a head-on collision.  The homeopath travels around the race-track in the same direction as the disease, and thwarts it by pulling at the reins.  If we consider the two words together and get these ideas in mind, we shall have no further trouble with allopaths and homeopaths—­except, perhaps, when they have rendered their services and presented their bills.

Objective and subjective are also a troublesome pair.  A thing is objective if it is an actual object or being, if it exists in itself rather than in our surmises.  A thing is subjective if it is the creature of a state of mind, if it has its existence in the thought or imagination of some person or other.  Thus if I meet a bear in the wilds, that bear is objective; whatever may be the state of my thoughts, he is there—­and it would be to my advantage to reckon with this fact.  But if a child who is sent off to bed alone says there is a bear in the room, the bear is subjective; it is not a living monster that will devour anybody, but a creature called into the mind of the child through dread.

EXERCISE — Opposites

Study the following words in pairs.  Consult the dictionary for actual meanings.  Then test your knowledge by embodying each word of each pair in a sentence, or in an illustration like those of the race-track and the bear in the preceding paragraphs.

superior, inferior           concord, discord
export, import               domestic, foreign
fact, fiction                prose, poetry
verbal, oral                 literal, figurative
predecessor, successor       genuine, artificial
positive, negative           practical, theoretical
optimism, pessimism          finite, infinite
longitude, latitude          evolution, revolution
oriental, occidental         pathos, bathos
sacred, profane              military, civil
clergy, laity                capital, labor
ingress, egress              element, compound
horizontal, perpendicular    competition, cooeperation
predestination, freewill     universal, particular
extrinsic, intrinsic         inflation, deflation
dorsal, ventral              acid, alkali
synonym, antonym             prologue, epilogue
nadir, zenith                amateur, connoisseur
anterior, posterior          stoic, epicure
ordinal, cardinal            centripetal, centrifugal
stalagmite, stalactite       orthodox, heterodox
homogeneous, heterogeneous   monogamy, polygamy
induction, deduction         egoism, altruism
Unitarian, Trinitarian       concentric, eccentric
herbivorous, carnivorous     deciduous, perennial
esoteric, exoteric           endogen, exogen
vertebrate, invertebrate     catalectic, acatalectic

Words Often Confused

Pairs of the second type are made up of words which are often confused by careless writers and speakers, and which should be accurately discriminated.