Stewart quotes with commendation from Hooke's Posthumous Works to show that the latter used the terms “precisely in the contrary acceptions to those assigned them in the definition of Sir Isaac Newton ( op. Both Stewart and Brougham recognized that Hooke used the terms by analogy with Greek geometry.

Though neither writer thinks that the method thus understood has no application in science-they mention that it has in astronomy and chemistry-they hold that Newton's conception of the method leads to an unclear view of the role of induction in science. But it is a spurious synthesis unlike the mathematical, and not warranted by induction, to prove the proposition by one set of facts, and by that proposition to explain-that is, classify-another set, without explaining it by itself”. In analysis, we should ascend not only from particulars to generals, but from the same particulars, and then the synthesis would be a descent through the same steps to the particular phenomena from the general fact. Brougham continues: “In physics, to make the operation similar to these, the same facts should be the ground or component parts of both. Both Stewart and Brougham point out that in mathematics the two operations, of necessity, use the same steps “the one being the steps of the other taken in reverse order” (p.

See Stewart's perceptive analysis ( Works, II, 252–272), and Brougham ( op. 404).Īs has been discussed by Stewart, Dugald, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, in Works, II ( Cambridge, 1829) Google Scholar and by Henry, Brougham, Lord, Natural Theology ( London, 1856) Google Scholar, Newton and many of his predecessors make a false analogy between the mathematical use of the techniques of analysis and synthesis, and their use in natural philosophy.

24 Now speaking of alternating between “experiments” and “conclusions” in Query 31 of the Opticks Newton is less explicit: “By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions to the Forces producing them and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general” (p.

Opticks 1704