Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
few primitive ideas, which are represented by symbols, and used
according to certain given postulates, it becomes possible to bring the
whole body of mathematics within a single treatment. The development of
this pure mathematics, which comes to be a logic of the mathematical
sciences, has been made possible by such a generalization of number
theory and theories of the elements of space and time that the rigor of
mathematical reasoning is secured, while the physical scientist is left
the widest freedom in the choice and construction of concepts and
imagery for his hypotheses. The only compulsion is a logical compulsion.
The metaphysical compulsion has disappeared from mathematics and the
sciences whose techniques it provides.
It was just this compulsion which confined ancient science. Euclidian
geometry defined the limits of mathematics. Even mechanics was
cultivated largely as a geometrical field. The metaphysical doctrine
according to which physical objects had their own places and their own
motions determined the limits within which astronomical speculations
could be carried on. Within these limits Greek mathematical genius
achieved marvelous results. The achievements of any period will be
limited by two variables: the type of problem against which science
formulates its methods, and the materials which analysis puts at the
scientist's disposal in attacking the problems. The technical problems
of the trisection of an angle and the duplication of a cube are
illustrations of the problems which characterize a geometrical doctrine
that was finding its technique. There appears also the method of
analysis of the problem into simpler problems, the assumption of the
truth of the conclusion to be proved and the process of arguing from
this to a known truth. The more fundamental problem which appears first
as the squaring of the circle, which becomes that of the determination
of the relation of the circle to its diameter and development of the
method of exhaustion, leads up to the sphere, the regular polyhedra, to
conic sections and the beginnings of trigonometry. Number was not freed
from the relations of geometrical magnitudes, though Archimedes could
conceive of a number greater or smaller than any assignable magnitude.
With the method of exhaustion, with the conceptions of number found in
writings of Archimedes and others, with the beginnings of spherical
geometry and trigonometry, and with the slow growth of algebra finding
its highest expression in that last flaring up of Greek mathematical
creation, the work of Diophantes; there were present all the conceptions
which were necessary for attack upon the problems of velocities and
changing velocities, and the development of the method of analysis which
has been the revolutionary tool of Europe since the Renaissance. But the
problems of a relation between the time and space of a motion that
should change just as a motion, without reference to the essence of the
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