_Analysis._--Is algebra rightly termed analysis? Edgar Poe, a very queer
American author, maintains the negative: he also enters into the
question as to whether games of skill and chance are useful to the
analytical powers, and gives the preference to draughts over chess, and
to whist over either. But he seems to think the chief applications of
analysis are to the interpretation of cryptographies, the
disentanglement of police puzzles, and the solution of charades!
There is, however, plausibility in his theory that a good analyst must
be both poet and mathematician. This is Ruskin's "imagination
penetrative:" such a faculty belonged to the minds of Verulam and
Newton, of Kepler and Galileo. I do not, however, see the necessity of
Ruskin's threefold division of the "imaginative faculty." Would not
"imagination analytic and creative" suffice?