These principles are originally only the results of experiments, and experiment allows them besides to be checked, and their more or less high degree of generality to be verified.

When they have been thus definitely established, they may serve as fresh starting-points, and, by deduction, lead to very varied discoveries.
The principles which govern physical science are few in number, and their very general form gives them a philosophical appearance, while we cannot long resist the temptation of regarding them as metaphysical dogmas.

It thus happens that the least bold physicists, those who have wanted to show themselves the most reserved, are themselves led to forget the experimental character of the laws they have propounded, and to see in them imperious beings whose authority, placed above all verification, can no longer be discussed.
Others, on the contrary, carry prudence to the extent of timidity.
They desire to grievously limit the field of scientific investigation, and they assign to science a too restricted domain.

They content themselves with representing phenomena by equations, and think that they ought to submit to calculation magnitudes experimentally determined, without asking themselves whether these calculations retain a physical meaning.

They are thus led to reconstruct a physics in which there again appears the idea of quality, understood, of course, not in the scholastic sense, since from this quality we can argue with some precision by representing it under numerical symbols, but still constituting an element of differentiation and of heterogeneity.
Notwithstanding the errors they may lead to if carried to excess, both these doctrines render, as a whole, most important service.