Perhaps you think I use too many comparisons; yet pardon still another.
You have doubtless seen those delicate assemblages of silicious needles
which form the skeleton of certain sponges. When the organic matter has
disappeared, there remains only a frail and elegant lace-work. True,
nothing is there except silica, but what is interesting is the form this
silica has taken, and we could not understand it if we did not know the
living sponge which has given it precisely this form. Thus it is that
the old intuitive notions of our fathers, even when we have abandoned
them, still imprint their form upon the logical constructions we have
put in their place.
This view of the aggregate is necessary for the inventor; it is equally
necessary for whoever wishes really to comprehend the inventor. Can
logic give it to us? No; the name mathematicians give it would suffice
to prove this. In mathematics logic is called _analysis_ and analysis
means _division_, _dissection_. It can have, therefore, no tool other
than the scalpel and the microscope.
Thus logic and intuition have each their necessary rôle. Each is
indispensable. Logic, which alone can give certainty, is the instrument
of demonstration; intuition is the instrument of invention.
VI
But at the moment of formulating this conclusion I am seized with
scruples. At the outset I distinguished two kinds of mathematical minds,
the one sort logicians and analysts, the others intuitionalists and
geometers. Well, the analysts also have been inventors. The names I have
just cited make my insistence on this unnecessary.
Here is a contradiction, at least apparently, which needs explanation.
And first, do you think these logicians have always proceeded from the
general to the particular, as the rules of formal logic would seem to
require of them? Not thus could they have extended the boundaries of
science; scientific conquest is to be made only by generalization.
In one of the chapters of 'Science and Hypothesis,' I have had occasion
to study the nature of mathematical reasoning, and I have shown how this
reasoning, without ceasing to be absolutely rigorous, could lift us from
the particular to the general by a procedure I have called _mathematical
induction_. It is by this procedure that the analysts have made science
progress, and if we examine the detail itself of their demonstrations,
we shall find it there at each instant beside the classic syllogism of
Aristotle. We, therefore, see already that the analysts are not simply
makers of syllogisms after the fashion of the scholastics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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