What we ask of him is to help us to see, to discern our way in the labyrinth which opens before us. Now, he sees best who stands highest. Examples abound, and I limit myself to the most striking. The first will show us how to change the language suffices to reveal generalizations not before suspected. When Newton's law has been substituted for Kepler's we still know only elliptic motion. Now, in so far as concerns this motion, the two laws differ only in form; we pass from one to the other by a simple differentiation. And yet from Newton's law may be deduced by an immediate generalization all the effects of perturbations and the whole of celestial mechanics. If, on the other hand, Kepler's enunciation had been retained, no one would ever have regarded the orbits of the perturbed planets, those complicated curves of which no one has ever written the equation, as the natural generalizations of the ellipse. The progress of observations would only have served to create belief in chaos. The second example is equally deserving of consideration. When Maxwell began his work, the laws of electro-dynamics admitted up to his time accounted for all the known facts. It was not a new experiment which came to invalidate them. But in looking at them under a new bias, Maxwell saw that the equations became more symmetrical when a term was added, and besides, this term was too small to produce effects appreciable with the old methods. You know that Maxwell's _a priori_ views awaited for twenty years an experimental confirmation; or, if you prefer, Maxwell was twenty years ahead of experiment. How was this triumph obtained? It was because Maxwell was profoundly steeped in the sense of mathematical symmetry; would he have been so, if others before him had not studied this symmetry for its own beauty? It was because Maxwell was accustomed to 'think in vectors,' and yet it was through the theory of imaginaries (neomonics) that vectors were introduced into analysis. And those who invented imaginaries hardly suspected the advantage which would be obtained from them for the study of the real world, of this the name given them is proof sufficient. In a word, Maxwell was perhaps not an able analyst, but this ability would have been for him only a useless and bothersome baggage. On the other hand, he had in the highest degree the intimate sense of mathematical analogies. Therefore it is that he made good mathematical physics. Maxwell's example teaches us still another thing. How should the equations of mathematical physics be treated? Should we simply deduce all the consequences and regard them as intangible realities? Far from it; what they should teach us above all is what can and what should be changed. It is thus that we get from them something useful.