The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact. As the result of the prominence of mathematicians in the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century was mathematically minded, more especially where French influence predominated. An exception must be made of the English empiricism derived from Locke. Outside France, Newton’s direct influence on philosophy is best seen in Kant, and not in Hume.
In the nineteenth century, the general influence of mathematics waned. The romantic movement in literature, and the idealistic movement in philosophy were not the products of mathematical minds. Also, even in science, the growth of geology, of zoology, and of the biological sciences generally, was in each case entirely disconnected from any reference to mathematics. The chief scientific excitement of the century was the Darwinian theory of evolution. Accordingly, mathematicians were in the background, so far as the general thought of that age was concerned. But this does not mean that mathematics was being neglected, or even that it was uninfluential. During the nineteenth century pure mathematics made almost as much progress as during all the preceding centuries from Pythagoras onwards. Of course progress was easier, because the technique had been perfected. But allowing for that, the change in mathematics between the years 1800 and 1900 is very remarkable. If we add in the previous hundred years, and take the two centuries preceding the present time, one is almost tempted to date the foundation of mathematics somewhere in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.
