Page:The Foundations of Science (1913).djvu/320

 habituated us to recognize them under the different vestments in which they disguise themselves. They have been compared with the data of experience, it has been seen how it was necessary to modify their enunciation to adapt them to these data; thereby they have been extended and consolidated. Thus they came to be regarded as experimental truths; the conception of central forces became then a useless, support, or rather an embarrassment, since it made the principles partake of its hypothetical character.

The frames then have not broken, because they are elastic; but they have enlarged; our fathers, who established them, did not labor in vain, and we recognize in the science of to-day the general traits of the sketch which they traced.