Page:A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism - Volume 2.djvu/195

529.] discovered the law by some process which he has not shewn us, and that when he had afterwards built up a perfect demonstration he removed all traces of the scaffolding by which he had raised it.

Faraday, on the other hand, shews us his unsuccessful as well as his successful experiments, and his crude ideas as well as his developed ones, and the reader, however inferior to him in inductive power, feels sympathy even more than admiration, and is tempted to believe that, if he had the opportunity, he too would be a discoverer. Every student therefore should read Ampère's research as a splendid example of scientific style in the statement of a discovery, but he should also study Faraday for the cultivation of a scientific spirit, by means of the action and reaction which will take place between newly discovered facts and nascent ideas in his own mind.

It was perhaps for the advantage of science that Faraday, though thoroughly conscious of the fundamental forms of space, time, and force, was not a professed mathematician. He was not tempted to enter into the many interesting researches in pure mathematics which his discoveries would have suggested if they had been exhibited in a mathematical form, and he did not feel called upon either to force his results into a shape acceptable to the mathematical taste of the time, or to express them in a form which mathematicians might attack. He was thus left at leisure to do his proper work, to coordinate his ideas with his facts, and to express them in natural, untechnical language.

It is mainly with the hope of making these ideas the basis of a mathematical method that I have undertaken this treatise.

529.] We are accustomed to consider the universe as made up of parts, and mathematicians usually begin by considering a single particle, and then conceiving its relation to another particle, and so on. This has generally been supposed the most natural method. To conceive of a particle, however, requires a process of abstraction, since all our perceptions are related to extended bodies, so that the idea of the all that is in our consciousness at a given instant is perhaps as primitive an idea as that of any individual thing. Hence there may be a mathematical method in which we proceed from the whole to the parts instead of from the parts to the whole. For example, Euclid, in his first book, conceives a line as traced out by a point, a surface as swept out by a line, and a solid as generated by a surface. But he also defines a surface as the