Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

REASONING AND DEDUCTIVE EVIDENCE. 417
conducting (so to speak) those who use them into the path of a
regular analysis; tracing out to them, in a well-ordered discourse, the model of a perfect decomposition, may be regarded
in a certain sense as analytical methods. But I stop short:
Condillac, to whom this idea belongs, has developed it too well
to leave any hope of improving upon his statement."
In a note upon this passage, however, M. De Gerando has
certainly improved not a little on the statement of Concldillac.
"In asserting," says he, "that languages may be regarded as
analytical methods, I have added the qualifying phrase, in a
certain sense, for the word method cannot be employed here with
exact propriety. Languages furnish the occasions and the
means of analysis; that is to say, they afford us assistance in
following that method; but they are not the method itsef. They
resemble signals or finger-posts placed on a road, to enable us
to discover our way; and if they help us to analyze, it is because they are themselves the results, and, as it were, the monuments, of an analysis which has been previously made; nor do
they contribute to keep us in the right path, but in proportion
to the degree of judgment with which that analysis has been
conducted."
Visionary theories of some logicians, occasioned by their inattention to the essential distinction between mathematics anzd other
sciences.- In a passage already quoted from De Gerando, he
takes notice of what he justly calls a rash assertion of Condillac,
"That mathematics possess no advantage over other sciences,
but what they derive from a better phraseology; and that all
of these might attain to the same characters of simplicity and of
certainty, if we knew how to give them signs equally perfect."
Leibnitz seems to point at an idea of the same sort, in those
obscure and enigmatical hints (not altogether worthy, in my
opinion, of his powerful and comprehensive genius) which he
has thrown out, about the miracles to be effected by a new art
of his own invention; to which art he sometimes gives the name
of Ars Combinatoria C(haracteristica, and sometimes of Ars
Combinatoria Generalis ac Vera. In one of his letters to Mr.
Oldenburgh, he speaks of a plan he had long been meditating,