PREFACE. 0123 15 THE Mathematical Sciences are at once the most perfect and the most valuable portion of human knowledge. They are valuable, not only for their own direct applications to the business of life, for the number of sciences to which they are the key, and the number of arts of which they are the foundation, but they have a value, higher and more important, if possible, in the strength which they give to the mind, and the exercise which they afford to its noblest faculties. There is, indeed, no road to clear, forcible, and connected reasoning, but that which is opened up by the Mathematician; and whatever be a man's profession or station in the world, we are always able, from his mode of stating a proposition, or conducting an argument, to say whether he be or be not a Mathematician. In every other department of knowledge, there is some uncertainty-some hypothesis assumed, of which the foundation is unsearched or inscrutable, or something which hinges upon the undefined and undefinable properties of mind or of matter, or upon the contingency of events. Is language the medium through which one would arrive at logical precision? Then living language is mutable, and dead language is ambiguous. Is it human nature? Then who can gauge the mind, who can number its propensities, or measure its eccentricities? Is it life and manners? Then the modes vary with every individual and with every hour. Is it medicine? Then the life of that man is short indeed who has not seen fifty nostrums and modes of treatment rise into vogue and sink into neglect, without any reason assigned, or assignable, either for their rise or their fall. Is it law? Then who shall number up ME29775 |