And yet, however far we thus might go, we could never rise to the general theorem, applicable to all numbers, which alone can be the object of science. To reach this, an infinity of syllogisms would be necessary; it would be necessary to overleap an abyss that the patience of the a.n.a.lyst, restricted to the resources of formal logic alone, never could fill up.
I asked at the outset why one could not conceive of a mind sufficiently powerful to perceive at a glance the whole body of mathematical truths.
The answer is now easy; a chess-player is able to combine four moves, five moves, in advance, but, however extraordinary he may be, he will never prepare more than a finite number of them; if he applies his faculties to arithmetic, he will not be able to perceive its general truths by a single direct intuition; to arrive at the smallest theorem he can not dispense with the aid of reasoning by recurrence, for this is an instrument which enables us to pa.s.s from the finite to the infinite.
This instrument is always useful, for, allowing us to overleap at a bound as many stages as we wish, it spares us verifications, long, irksome and monotonous, which would quickly become impracticable. But it becomes indispensable as soon as we aim at the general theorem, to which a.n.a.lytic verification would bring us continually nearer without ever enabling us to reach it.
In this domain of arithmetic, we may think ourselves very far from the infinitesimal a.n.a.lysis, and yet, as we have just seen, the idea of the mathematical infinite already plays a preponderant role, and without it there would be no science, because there would be nothing general.
VI
The judgment on which reasoning by recurrence rests can be put under other forms; we may say, for example, that in an infinite collection of different whole numbers there is always one which is less than all the others.
We can easily pa.s.s from one enunciation to the other and thus get the illusion of having demonstrated the legitimacy of reasoning by recurrence. But we shall always be arrested, we shall always arrive at an undemonstrable axiom which will be in reality only the proposition to be proved translated into another language.
We can not therefore escape the conclusion that the rule of reasoning by recurrence is irreducible to the principle of contradiction.
Neither can this rule come to us from experience; experience could teach us that the rule is true for the first ten or hundred numbers; for example, it can not attain to the indefinite series of numbers, but only to a portion of this series, more or less long but always limited.
Now if it were only a question of that, the principle of contradiction would suffice; it would always allow of our developing as many syllogisms as we wished; it is only when it is a question of including an infinity of them in a single formula, it is only before the infinite that this principle fails, and there too, experience becomes powerless.
This rule, inaccessible to a.n.a.lytic demonstration and to experience, is the veritable type of the synthetic _a priori_ judgment. On the other hand, we can not think of seeing in it a convention, as in some of the postulates of geometry.
Why then does this judgment force itself upon us with an irresistible evidence? It is because it is only the affirmation of the power of the mind which knows itself capable of conceiving the indefinite repet.i.tion of the same act when once this act is possible. The mind has a direct intuition of this power, and experience can only give occasion for using it and thereby becoming conscious of it.
But, one will say, if raw experience can not legitimatize reasoning by recurrence, is it so of experiment aided by induction? We see successively that a theorem is true of the number 1, of the number 2, of the number 3 and so on; the law is evident, we say, and it has the same warranty as every physical law based on observations, whose number is very great but limited.
Here is, it must be admitted, a striking a.n.a.logy with the usual procedures of induction. But there is an essential difference. Induction applied to the physical sciences is always uncertain, because it rests on the belief in a general order of the universe, an order outside of us. Mathematical induction, that is, demonstration by recurrence, on the contrary, imposes itself necessarily because it is only the affirmation of a property of the mind itself.
VII
Mathematicians, as I have said before, always endeavor to _generalize_ the propositions they have obtained, and, to seek no other example, we have just proved the equality:
_a_ + 1 = 1 + _a_
and afterwards used it to establish the equality
_a_ + _b_ = _b_ + _a_
which is manifestly more general.
Mathematics can, therefore, like the other sciences, proceed from the particular to the general.
This is a fact which would have appeared incomprehensible to us at the outset of this study, but which is no longer mysterious to us, since we have ascertained the a.n.a.logies between demonstration by recurrence and ordinary induction.
Without doubt recurrent reasoning in mathematics and inductive reasoning in physics rest on different foundations, but their march is parallel, they advance in the same sense, that is to say, from the particular to the general.
Let us examine the case a little more closely.
To demonstrate the equality
_a_ + 2 = 2 + _a_
it suffices to twice apply the rule
(1) _a_ + 1 = 1 + _a_
and write
(2) _a_ + 2 = _a_ + 1 + 1 = 1 + _a_ + 1 = 1 + 1 + _a_ = 2 + _a_.
The equality (2) thus deduced in purely a.n.a.lytic way from the equality (1) is, however, not simply a particular ease of it; it is something quite different.
We can not therefore even say that in the really a.n.a.lytic and deductive part of mathematical reasoning we proceed from the general to the particular in the ordinary sense of the word.
The two members of the equality (2) are simply combinations more complicated than the two members of the equality (1), and a.n.a.lysis only serves to separate the elements which enter into these combinations and to study their relations.
Mathematicians proceed therefore "by construction," they "construct"
combinations more and more complicated. Coming back then by the a.n.a.lysis of these combinations, of these aggregates, so to speak, to their primitive elements, they perceive the relations of these elements and from them deduce the relations of the aggregates themselves.
This is a purely a.n.a.lytical proceeding, but it is not, however, a proceeding from the general to the particular, because evidently the aggregates can not be regarded as more particular than their elements.
Great importance, and justly, has been attached to this procedure of "construction," and some have tried to see in it the necessary and sufficient condition for the progress of the exact sciences.
Necessary, without doubt; but sufficient, no.
For a construction to be useful and not a vain toil for the mind, that it may serve as stepping-stone to one wishing to mount, it must first of all possess a sort of unity enabling us to see in it something besides the juxtaposition of its elements.
Or, more exactly, there must be some advantage in considering the construction rather than its elements themselves.
What can this advantage be?
Why reason on a polygon, for instance, which is always decomposable into triangles, and not on the elementary triangles?
It is because there are properties appertaining to polygons of any number of sides and that may be immediately applied to any particular polygon.
Usually, on the contrary, it is only at the cost of the most prolonged exertions that they could be found by studying directly the relations of the elementary triangles. The knowledge of the general theorem spares us these efforts.
A construction, therefore, becomes interesting only when it can be ranged beside other a.n.a.logous constructions, forming species of the same genus.
If the quadrilateral is something besides the juxtaposition of two triangles, this is because it belongs to the genus polygon.
Moreover, one must be able to demonstrate the properties of the genus without being forced to establish them successively for each of the species.
To attain that, we must necessarily mount from the particular to the general, ascending one or more steps.
The a.n.a.lytic procedure "by construction" does not oblige us to descend, but it leaves us at the same level.