It is a servant to unworthy inertia; and worse, it is a cloak to mental unreadiness and to conscious moral cowardice.

The guess is a bluff to fortune when the honest gauntlet of ignorance should be thrown down to the issue.
The effects of this show themselves in a habit of mind tolerated in persons of a literary bent, which is a marked contrast to that demanded and exemplified by science.

I think that much of our literary impressionism and sentimentalism reveal the guessing habit.
Yet why guess?
Why be content with an impression?
Why hint of a "certain this and a certain that" when the "certain," if it mean anything, commonly means the uncertain?
Things worth writing about should be formulated clearly enough to be understood.

Why let the personal reaction of the individual's feeling suffice?
Our youth need to be told that the guess is immoral, that hypothesis is the servant of research, that the private impression instructs nobody, that presentiment is usually wrong, that science is the best antidote to the fear of ghosts, and that the reply "I guess so" betrays itself, whether it arise from bravado, from cowardice, or from literary finesse! I think that the great need of our life is honesty, that the bulwark of honesty in education is exact knowledge with the scientific habit of mind, and, furthermore, that the greatest hindrance to these things is the training which does not, with all the sanctions at its command, distinguish the real, with its infallible tests, from the shadowy and vague, but which contents itself with the throw of the intellectual dice box.

Any study which tends to make the difference between truth and error pass with the throwing of a die, and which leads the student to be content with a result he can not verify, has somewhat the function in his education of the puzzle in our society amusements or the game of sliced animals in the nursery..