The nature of mathematics

science, philosophy, religion, history, economics, and literature published in Great Britain at sixpence each. "The purpose of this little volume," says the the author (p. 7), "is not to give—like a text-book—a collection of mathematical methods and examples, but to do, firstly, what text-books do not do : to show how and why these methods grew up. All these methods are simply means, contrived with the conscious or unconscious end of economy of thought-labor, for the convenient handling of long and complicated chains of reasoning. This reasoning, when applied to foretell natural events, on the