His audacious
views revealed to him a new world, but to explore this world a surer
and more patient method was needed.
Maxwell succeeded in stating with precision certain points of
Faraday's ideas, and he gave them the mathematical form which, often
wrongly, impresses physicists, but which when it exactly encloses a
theory, is a certain proof that this theory is at least coherent and
logical.[23]
[Footnote 23: It will no doubt be a shock to those whom Professor
Henry Armstrong has lately called the "mathematically-minded" to find
a member of the Poincare family speaking disrespectfully of the
science they have done so much to illustrate. One may perhaps compare
the expression in the text with M. Henri Poincare's remark in his last
allocution to the Academie des Sciences, that "Mathematics are
sometimes a nuisance, and even a danger, when they induce us to affirm
more than we know" (_Comptes-rendus_, 17th December 1906).]
The work of Maxwell is over-elaborated, complex, difficult to read,
and often ill-understood, even at the present day.
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