has long been regarded as the reason par excellence."

" 'Il y a à parièr,' " replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, " 'que
toute idée publique, toute convention reçue est une sottise, car elle
a convenue au plus grand nombre.' The mathematicians, I grant you,
have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you
allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as
truth. With an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have
insinuated the term 'analysis' into application to algebra. The
French are the originators of this particular deception; but if a
term is of any importance - if words derive any value from
applicability - then 'analysis' conveys 'algebra' about as much as,
in Latin, 'ambitus' implies 'ambition,' 'religio' 'religion,' or
'homines honesti,' a set of honorablemen."

"You have a quarrel on hand, I see," said I, "with some of the
algebraists of Paris; but proceed."

"I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which
is cultivated in any especial form other than the abstractly logical.
I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study.
The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical
reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and
quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of
what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this
error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with
which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of
general truth. What is true of relation - of form and quantity - is
often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter
science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal