Regressive synonyms

A characteristic feature of the calculus is that a meaning can be attached to a symbol of this kind by adopting a new rule, called that of regressive multiplication, as distinguished from the foregoing, which is progressive.

Much of the Principia consists of synthetical deductions from definitions and axioms. But the discovery of the centripetal force of the planets to the sun is an analytic deduction from the facts of their motion discovered by Kepler to their real ground, and is so stated by Newton in the first regressive order of Aristotle - P-M, S-P, S-M.

He re-defines analysis in the very opposite way to the ancients; whereas they defined it as a regressive process from consequence to ground, according to Wundt it is a progressive process of taking for granted a proposition and deducing a consequence, which being true verifies the proposition.

But his account of the first is imperfect, because in ancient analysis the more general propositions, with which it concludes, are not mere consequences, but the real grounds of the given proposition; while his addition of the second reduces the nature of analysis to the utmost confusion, because hypothetical deduction is progressive from hypothesis to consequent facts whereas analysis is regressive from consequent facts to real ground.

Deduction is analysis when it is regressive from consequence to real ground, as when we start from the proposition that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles and deduce analytically that therefore (i) they are equal to equal angles made by a straight line standing on another straight line, and (2) such equal angles are two right angles.