Note 131 — PREFATORY NOTE. (continued 2)
Reading edition
See Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, Boston, 1874, pp. 139 and 375. Compare with any statement of his religious views that Dean Cockburn was able to make, the following from Mrs. Somerville: "Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science which have been, by slow degrees, vouchsafed to man—and are still granted in these latter times, by the differential calculus, now superseded by the higher algebra—all of which must have existed in that sublimely omniscient mind from eternity."—See Personal Recollections, pp. 140, 141.