legitimate. We shall also see that there are several sorts of hypotheses; that some are verifiable, and once confirmed by experiment become fruitful truths; that others, powerless to lead us astray, may be useful to us in fixing our ideas; that others, finally, are hypotheses only in appearance and are reducible to disguised definitions or conventions.
These last are met with above all in mathematics and the related sciences. Thence precisely it is that these sciences get their rigor; these conventions are the work of the free activity of our mind, which, in this domain, recognizes no obstacle. Here our mind ean affirm, since it decrees; but let us understand that while these decrees are imposed upon our science, which, without them, would be impossible, they are not imposed upon nature. Are they then arbitrary? No, else were they sterile. Experiment leaves us our freedom of choice, but it guides us by aiding us to discern the easiest way. Our decrees are therefore like those of a prince, absolute but wise, who consults his council of state.
Some people have been struck by this character of free convention recognizable in certain fundamental principles of the sciences. They have wished to generalize beyond measure, and, at the same time, they have forgotten that liberty is not license. Thus they have reached what is called nominalism, and have asked themselves if the savant is not the dupe of his own definitions and if the world he thinks he discovers is not simply created by his own caprice.[1] Under these conditions science would be certain, but deprived of significance.
If this were so, science would be powerless. Now every day we see it work under our very eyes. That could not be if it taught us nothing of reality. Still, the things themselves are not what it can reach, as the naive dogmatists think, but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality.
Such is the conclusion to which we shall come, but for that we must review the series of sciences from arithmetic and geometry to mechanics and experimental physics.
