Page:The Foundations of Science (1913).djvu/24

6 For a Latin, truth can be expressed only by equations; it must obey laws simple, logical, symmetric and fitted to satisfy minds in love with mathematical elegance.

The Anglo-Saxon to depict a phenomenon will first be engrossed in making a model, and he will make it with common materials, such as our crude, unaided senses show us them. He also makes a hypothesis, he assumes implicitly that nature, in her finest elements, is the same as in the complicated aggregates which alone are within the reach of our senses. He concludes from the body to the atom.

Both therefore make hypotheses, and this indeed is necessary, since no scientist has ever been able to get on without them. The essential thing is never to make them unconsciously.

From this point of view again, it would be well for these two sorts of physicists to know something of each other; in studying the work of minds so unlike their own, they will immediately recognize that in this work there has been an accumulation of hypotheses.

Doubtless this will not suffice to make them comprehend that they on their part have made just as many; each sees the mote without seeing the beam; but by their criticisms they will warn their rivals, and it may be supposed these will not fail to render them the same service.

The English procedure often seems to us crude, the analogies they think they discover to us seem at times superficial; they are not sufficiently interlocked, not precise enough; they sometimes permit incoherences, contradictions in terms, which shock a geometric spirit and which the employment of the mathematical method would immediately have put in evidence. But most often it is, on the other hand, very fortunate that they have not perceived these contradictions; else would they have rejected their model and could not have deduced from it the brilliant results they have often made to come out of it.

And then these very contradictions, when they end by perceiving them, have the advantage of showing them the hypothetical character of their conceptions, whereas the mathematical method, by its apparent rigor and inflexible course, often inspires in us a confidence nothing warrants, and prevents our looking about us.