In other words, should we constrain the young people to change the nature of their minds? Such an attempt would be vain; we do not possess the philosopher's stone which would enable us to transmute one into another the metals confided to us; all we can do is to work with them, adapting ourselves to their properties.
Many children are incapable of becoming mathematicians, to whom however it is necessary to teach mathematics; and the mathematicians themselves are not all cast in the same mold. To read their works suffices to distinguish among them two sorts of minds, the logicians like Weierstrass for example, the intuitives like Riemann. There is the same difference among our students. The one sort prefer to treat their problems 'by analysis' as they say, the others 'by geometry.'
It is useless to seek to change anything of that, and besides would it be desirable? It is well that there are logicians and that there are intuitives; who would dare say whether he preferred that Weierstrass had never written or that there never had been a Riemann? We must therefore resign ourselves to the diversity of minds, or better we must rejoice in it.
- Since the word understand has many meanings, the definitions which will be best understood by some will not be best suited to others. We have those which seek to produce an image, and those where we confine ourselves to combining empty forms, perfectly intelligible, but purely intelligible, which abstraction has deprived of all matter.
I know not whether it be necessary to cite examples. Let us cite them, anyhow, and first the definition of fractions will furnish us an extreme case. In the primary schools, to define a fraction, one cuts up an apple or a pie; it is cut up mentally of course and not in reality, because I do not suppose the budget of the primary instruction allows of such prodigality. At the Normal School, on the other hand, or at the college, it is said: a fraction is the combination of two whole numbers separated by a horizontal bar; we define by conventions the operations to which these symbols may be submitted; it is proved that the rules of these operations are the same as in calculating with whole numbers, and we ascertain finally that multiplying the fraction, according to these rules, by the denominator gives the numerator. This is all very well because we are addressing young people long familiarized with the notion of fractions through having cut up apples or other objects, and whose mind, matured by a hard mathematical education, has come little by little to desire a purely logical definition. But the débutant to whom one should try to give it, how dumfounded!
Such also are the definitions found in a book justly admired and greatly honored, the Foundations of Geometry by Hilbert. See in fact how he begins: We think three systems of things which we shall call points, straights and planes. What are these 'things'?
We know not, nor need we know; it would even be a pity to seek to know; all we have the right to know of them is what the assumptions tell us; this for example: Two distinct points always determine a straight, which is followed by this remark: in place of determine, we may say the two points are on the straight, or the straight goes through these two points or joins the two points.
Thus 'to be on a straight' is simply defined as synonymous with 'determine a straight.' Behold a book of which I think much good, but which I should not recommend to a school boy. Yet I could do so without fear, he would not read much of it. I have taken extreme examples and no teacher would dream of going that far. But even stopping short of such models, does he not already expose himself to the same danger?