114) Víctor Manuel Hernández Márquez – Was Pierre Duhem an Esprit de Finesse? 100 negative valuation of English physics discussed above.18 When he argues, however, that a unyielding sentiment leads him to think that Thomson's and Maxwell's theories cannot be adequate, he is implicitly appealing to a distinctive quality that he will associate with the esprit de finesse; this time, not only in La théorie physique, but more importantly, in the texts that make up La science allemande. However, in the former context, this intuition turns out to be somewhat paradoxical since this sentiment lends support to the conception of the theory of physics as abstract representation of experimental laws. As Duhem argues in this essay, however, this approach is first and foremost logical, philosophical, and metaphysical, while the English School's conception is imaginative, anti-metaphysical, and thus, practical. In order to show this, he notes that Thomson does not pose any philosophical problem (e.g. whether the resulting elements of matter can occupy varying volumes, that is, if they can be condensed) since their approach to build mechanical models is not structured to be grasped by reason, but rather by the imagination (cf. Duhem 1987a [1893a], 122). This is the anti-metaphysical feature of English physics. In short, English physics lacks a cosmology.19 In the case of mathematical tools, the logico-philosophical nexus is linked to the process of abstraction employed to determine concepts in physical theory; however, in the case of the English School's mechanical models, algebraic analysis is readily available to represent relations established in the model without a concern for the existence of an analogy with the actual properties of bodies; that is to say, whether or not the algebraic magnitudes correspond to real elements. By the same token, there is no concern for the logical origins of equations. In fact, the fundamental differences between both conceptions about the physical theory can be figure out whether the the