Page:The Foundations of Science (1913).djvu/23

Rh groups of substitutions, and under its most abstract form, the farthest removed from the practical.

Moreover, Dr. Halsted gives regularly each year a review of all productions relative to the non-Euclidean geometry, and he has about him a public deeply interested in his work. He has initiated this public into the ideas of Hilbert, and he has even written an elementary treatise on ‘Rational Geometry,’ based on the principles of the renowned German savant.

To introduce this principle into teaching is surely this time to burn all bridges of reliance upon sensory intuition, and this is, I confess, a boldness which seems to me almost rashness.

The American public is therefore much better prepared than has been thought for investigating the origin of the notion of space.

Moreover, to analyze this concept is not to sacrifice reality to I know not what phantom. The geometric language is after all only a language. Space is only a word that we have believed a thing. What is the origin of this word and of other words also? What things do they hide? To ask this is permissible; to forbid it would be, on the contrary, to be a dupe of words; it would be to adore a metaphysical idol, like savage peoples who prostrate themselves before a statue of wood without daring to take a look at what is within.

In the study of nature, the contrast between the Anglo-Saxon spirit and the Latin spirit is still greater.

The Latins seek in general to put their thought in mathematical form; the English prefer to express it by a material representation.

Both doubtless rely only on experience for knowing the world; when they happen to go beyond this, they consider their foreknowledge as only provisional, and they hasten to ask its definitive confirmation from nature herself.

But experience is not all, and the savant is not passive; he does not wait for the truth to come and find him, or for a chance meeting to bring him face to face with it. He must go to meet it, and it is for his thinking to reveal to him the way leading thither. For that there is need of an instrument; well, just there begins the difference—the instrument the Latins ordinarily choose is not that preferred by the Anglo-Saxons.