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imagery to become constitutive like the ideas of the geometrician. On the contrary, the assumptions of the magnetists (as for instance, the hypothesis that the planet itself is one vast magnet, or that an immense magnet is concealed within it; or that of a concentric globe within the earth, revolving on its own independent axis) are but repetitions of the same fact or phænomenon looked at through a magnifying glass; the reiteration of the problem, not its solution. The naturalist, who cannot or will not see, that one fact is often worth a thousand, as including them all in itself, and that it first makes all the others facts; who has not the head to comprehend, the soul to reverence, a central experiment or observation (what the Greeks would perhaps have called a protophænomon); will never receive an auspicious answer from the oracle of nature.

ESSAY VII.

The sun doth give

Brightness to the eye: and some say,

If not enlighten'd by the Intelligence

that the sun

That doth inhabit it, would shine no more
Than a dull clod of earth.

CARTWRIGHT.

IT is strange, yet characteristic of the spirit that was at work during the latter half of the last century, and of which the French revolution was, we hope, the closing monsoon, that the writings of PLATO should be accused of estranging the mind from sober experience and substantial matter-of-fact, and of debauching it by fictions and generalities. Plato, whose method is inductive throughout, who argues on all subjects not only from, but in and by, inductions of facts! Who warns us indeed against that usurpation of the senses, which quenching the "lumen siccum" of the mind, VOL. III.

sends it astray after individual cases for their own sakes; against that “tenuem et manipularem experientiam," which remains ignorant even of the transitory relations, to which the

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pauca particularia” of its idolatry not seldom owe their fluxional existence; but who so far oftener, and with such unmitigated hostility, pursues the assumptions, abstractions, generalities, and verbal legerdemain of the sophists! Strange, but still more strange, that a notion so groundless should be entitled to plead in its behalf the authority of Lord BACON, from whom the Latin words in the preceding sentence are taken, and whose scheme of logic, as applied to the contemplation of nature, is Platonic throughout, and differing only in the mode which in Lord Bacon is dogmatic, i. e. assertory, in Plato tentative, and (to adopt the Socratic phrase) obstetric. We are not the first, or even among the first, who have considered Bacon's studied depreciation of the ancients, with his silence, or worse than silence, concerning the merits of his contemporaries, as the least amiable, the least exhilirating side in the character of our illustrious countryman.

His detractions from the Divine PLATO it is more easy to explain than to justify or even than to palliate and that he has merely retaliated ARISTOTLE'S own unfair treatment of his predecessors and contemporaries, may lessen the pain, but should not blind us by the injustice of the aspersions on the name and works of this philosopher. The most eminent of our recent zoologists and mineralogists have acknowledged with respect, and even with expressions of wonder, the performances of ARISTOTLE, as the first clearer and breaker-up of the ground in natural history. It is indeed scarcely possible to pursue the treatise on colors, falsely ascribed to Theophrastus, the scholar and successor of Aristotle, after a due consideration of the state and means of science at that time, without resenting the assertion, that he had utterly enslaved his investigations in natural history to his own system of logic (logicæ suæ prorsus mancipavit). Nor let it be forgotten that the sunny side of Lord Bacon's character is to be found neither in his inductions, nor in the application of his own method to particular phænomena, or particular classes of physical

facts, which are at least as crude for the age of Gilbert, Galileo, and Kepler, as Aristotle's for that of Philip and Alexander. Nor is it to be found in his recommendation (which is wholly independent of his inestimable principles of scientific method) of tabular collections of particulars. Let any unprejudiced naturalist turn to Lord Bacon's questions and proposals for the investigation of single problems; to his Discourse on the Winds; or to the almost comical caricature of this scheme in the " Method of improving Natural Philosophy," (page 22 to 48), by Robert Hooke (the history of whose multifold inventions, and indeed of his whole philosophical life, is the best answer to the schemeif a scheme so palpably impracticable needs any answer), and put it to his conscience, whether any desirable end could be hoped for from such a process; or inquire of his own experience, or historical recollections whether any important discovery was ever made in this way.*

We refer the reader to the Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, M.D. F.R.C. &c. FOLIO, published under the auspices of the Royal Society, by their Secretary, Richard Waller and especially to the pages from p. 22

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