To Adams's vision, Willard
Gibbs stood on the same plane with the three or four greatest
minds of his century, and the idea that a man so incomparably
superior should find help anywhere filled him with wonder. He
sent for the volume and read it. From the time he sailed for
Europe and reached his den on the Avenue du Bois until he took
his return steamer at Cherbourg on December 26, he did little but
try to kind out what Karl Pearson could have taught Willard
Gibbs.
Here came in, more than ever, the fatal handicap of ignorance
in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed, as the
right to judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of
the finer values of French or German, and often deceived by the
intricacies of thought hidden in the muddiness of the medium, one
could sometimes catch a tendency to intelligible meaning even in
Kant or Hegel; but one had not the right to a suspicion of error
where the tool of thought was algebra. Adams could see in such
parts of the "Grammar" as he could understand, little more than
an enlargement of Stallo's book already twenty years old. He
never found out what it could have taught a master like Willard
Gibbs. Yet the book had a historical value out of all proportion
to its science. No such stride had any Englishman before taken in
the lines of English thought.
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