tional mechanics when it is isolated will be but very little, and can in no way be compared with that grand body of doctrine which is called geometry.
We now understand why the teaching of mechanics should remain experimental. Thus only can we be made to understand the genesis of the science, and that is indispensable for a complete knowledge of the science itself. Besides, if we study mechanics, it is in order to apply it; and we can only apply it if it remains objective. Now, as we have seen, when principles gain in generality and certainty they lose in objectivity. It is therefore especially with the objective side of principles that we must be early familiarised, and this can only be by passing from the particular to the general, instead of from the general to the particular.
Principles are conventions and definitions in disguise. They are, however, deduced from experimental laws, and these laws have, so to speak, been erected into principles to which our mind attributes an absolute value. Some philosophers have generalised far too much. They have thought that the principles were the whole of science, and therefore that the whole of science was conventional. This paradoxical doctrine, which is called Nominalism, cannot stand examination. How can a law become a principle? It expressed a relation between two real terms, A and B; but it was
