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. From another point of view, however, the two conceptions are very unlike, and if all must be said, they are very unlike because of a common fault. The English wish to make the world out of what we see. I mean what we see with the unaided eye, not the microscope, nor that still more subtile microscope, the human head guided by scientific induction. The Latin wants to make it out of formulas, but these formulas are still the quintessenced expression of what we see. In a word, both would make the unknown out of the known, and their excuse is that there is no way of doing otherwise. And yet is this legitimate, if the unknown be the simple and the known the complex? Shall we not get of the simple a false idea, if we think it like the complex, or worse yet if we strive to make it out of elements which are themselves compounds? Is not each great advance accomplished precisely the day some one has discovered under the complex aggregate shown by our senses something far more simple, not even resembling it--as when Newton replaced Kepler's three laws by the single law of gravitation, which was something simpler, equivalent, yet unlike? One is justified in asking if we are not on the eve of just such a revolution or one even more important. Matter seems on the point of losing its mass, its solidest attribute, and resolving itself into electrons. Mechanics must then give place to a broader conception which will explain it, but which it will not explain.