Editorial

William Osler once quoted an old writer as saying that there are four sorts of readers: “Sponges, which attract all without distinguishing; howreglasses, which receive and powre out as fast; bagges, which only return the dregges of the spices and let the wine escape; and Sives, which retaine the best onely.” As editors, we have given detailed consideration to our readership of “sives”, but wonder what determines the individually constructed mesh on the “sive.” What do readers of our journal want?

J.L. Crammer (1998) says, an editor in fact creates the journal, however you look at it. He goes on to say, “the scientific journal is not a place for rhetoric or literary flourishes. The editor is there on the reader's behalf to promote intelligibility, clear, simple, precise exposition so that he and every professional reader can understand every paper, specialized though it may be” (p. 114). To survive, clearly our journal has to address a much wider audience than clinical psychoanalysts alone. In our opinion, there is no reason to limit the definition of scientific as Crammer does to a narrow derivative of logical positivism. The transmission of the understanding of factual material from writer to reader in as unambiguous a fashion as possible sometimes sacrifices style, esthetic balance and often makes the reading of scientific journals a boring activity in spite of interesting factual material. Our journal is evolving to a definition of science which is much broader than Crammer's. Literary flourishes and rhetoric will become part and parcel of the package we are creating for the readership. Creative works of art seem to be coming across our desk with increasing frequency. Ideas alone are of high, if not paramount, importance since the social problems we face are of gargantuan size, and growing in spite of the best efforts of 20th century scientific research and technology to solve them. We welcome this broadened definition of science, a science resurrected from one of