This is sufficient, it is true, to give to it a complete character of
logical universality, when we consider all phenomena from the most
elevated point of view of natural philosophy. In fact, if all the parts
of the universe were conceived as immovable, we should evidently have
only geometrical phenomena to observe, since all would be reduced to
relations of form, magnitude, and position; then, having regard to the
motions which take place in it, we would have also to consider
mechanical phenomena. Hence the universe, in the statical point of view,
presents only geometrical phenomena; and, considered dynamically, only
mechanical phenomena. Thus geometry and mechanics constitute the two
fundamental natural sciences, in this sense, that all natural effects
may be conceived as simple necessary results, either of the laws of
extension or of the laws of motion.
But although this conception is always logically possible, the
difficulty is to specialize it with the necessary precision, and to
follow it exactly in each of the general cases offered to us by the
study of nature; that is, to effectually reduce each principal question
of natural philosophy, for a certain determinate order of phenomena, to
the question of geometry or mechanics, to which we might rationally
suppose it should be brought. This transformation, which requires great
progress to have been previously made in the study of each class of
phenomena, has thus far been really executed only for those of
astronomy, and for a part of those considered by terrestrial physics,
properly so called. It is thus that astronomy, acoustics, optics, &c.,
have finally become applications of mathematical science to certain
orders of observations.[1] But these applications not being by their
nature rigorously circumscribed, to confound them with the science would
be to assign to it a vague and indefinite domain; and this is done in
the usual division, so faulty in so many other respects, of the
mathematics into "Pure" and "Applied."
[Footnote 1: The investigation of the mathematical phenomena of the
laws of heat by Baron Fourier has led to the establishment, in an
entirely direct manner, of Thermological equations. This great
discovery tends to elevate our philosophical hopes as to the future
extensions of the legitimate applications of mathematical analysis,
and renders it proper, in the opinion of author, to regard
_Thermology_ as a third principal branch of concrete mathematics.]
ABSTRACT MATHEMATICS.
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