anticipate its necessity, and who does not believe that ter-light is missing, so in this: the reflective mind necessity to be demonstrable by an insight into its avoids Scylla only to lose itself on Charybdis. If we nature, whenever and wherever such insight can be adhere to the general notion of sex, as abstracted obtained. We acknowledge, we reverence the obli- from the more obvious modes and forms in which the gations of Botany to Linnæus, who, adopting from sexual relation manifests itself, we soon meet with Bartholinus and others the sexuality of plants, ground-whole classes of plants to which it is found inapplied thereon a scheme of classific and distinctive marks, cable. If arbitrarily, we give it infinite extension, it by which one man's experience may be communicated is dissipated into the barren truism, that all specific to others, and the objects safely reasoned on while products suppose specific means of production. absent, and recognized as soon as and whenever they are met with. He invented an universal character for the language of Botany, chargeable with no greater imperfections than are to be found in the alphabets of every particular language. As for the study of the ancients, so of the works of nature, an accidence and a dictionary are the first and indispensable requisites: and to the illustrious Swede, Botany is indebted for both. But neither was the central idea of vegetation itself, by the light of which we might have seen the collateral relations of the vegetable to the inorganic and to the animal world; nor the constitutive nature THUS a growth and a birth are distinguished by and inner necessity of sex itself, revealed to Lin- the mere verbal definition, that the latter is a whole næus.* Hence, as in all other cases where the mas-in itself, the former not: and when we would apply

ESSAY VI.

̓Απάντων ζητῦντες λόγον ἔξωθεν, ἀναιρᾶσι λόγον. Seeking the reason of all things from without, they preclude reason. THEOPH. in Mel.

even this to nature, we are baffled by objects (the flower polypus, &c. &c.) in which each is the other. All that can be done by the most patient and active

*The word nature has been used in two senses, viz. actively and passively; energetic (forma formans,) and material (forma formata.) In the first (the sense in which the word is used in the text) it signifies the inward principle of what-industry, by the widest and most continuous researchever is requisite for the reality of a thing as existent: while the essence, or essential property, signifies the inner principle of all that appertains to the possibility of a thing. Hence, in accurate language, we say the essence of a mathematical circle or other geometrical figure, not the nature: because in the conception of forms purely geometrical there is no expression or implication of their real existence. In the second, or material sense, of the word Nature, we mean by it the sum total of all things, so far as they are objects of our senses, and consequently of possible experience-the aggregate of phenomena, whether existing for our outward senses, or for our inner sense. The doctrine concerning material nature would therefore (the word Physiology being both ambiguous in itself, and already otherwise appropriated) be more proper

ly entitled Phenomenology, distinguished into its two grand divisions, Somatalogy and Psychology. The doctrine concerning energetic nature is comprised in the science of Dynamics: the union of which with Phenomenology, and the alliance of both with the sciences of the Possible, or of the Conceivable, viz. Logic and Mathematics, constitute Natural Philosophy.

Having thus explained the term Nature, we now more especially entreat the reader's attention to the sense, in which

here, and every where through this Essay, we use the word Idea. We assert, that the very impulse to universalize any phenomenon involves the prior assumption of some efficient law in nature, which in a thousand different forms is evermore one and the same; entire in each, yet comprehending all; and incapable of being abstracted or generalized from any number of phenomena, because it is itself pre-supposed in each and all as their common ground and condition; and because every definition of a genus is the adequate definition of the lowest species alone, while the efficient law must contain the ground of all in all. It is attributed, never derived. The utmost we ever venture to say is, that the falling of an apple suggested the law of gravitation to Sir 1. Newton. Now a law and an idea are correlative terms, and differ only as object and subject, as being and truth.

es; all that the amplest survey of the vegetable realm, brought under immediate contemplation by the most stupendous connections of species and varieties, can suggest; all that minutest dissection and exactest chemical analysis, can unfold; all that varied experiment and the position of plants and of their component parts in every conceivable relation to light, heat, (and whatever else we distinguish as imponderable substances) to earth, air, water, to the supposed constituents of air and water, separate and in all proportions-in short all that chemical agents and re-agents can disclose or adduce;-all these have been brought, as conscripts, into the field, with the completest accoutrement, in the best discipline, under the ablest commanders. Yet after all that was effected by Linnæus himself, not to mention the labors of Cæsalpinus, Ray, Gesner, Tournefort, and the other heroes who preceded the general adoption of the sexual system, as the basis of artificial arrangement-after all the successive toils and enterprises of HEDWIG, JUSSIEU, MIRBEL, SMITH, KNIGHT, ELLIS, &c. &c.—what is BOTANY at this present hour? Little more than an enormous nomenclature; a huge catalogue, bien arrangé, yearly and monthly augmented, in various editions, each with its own scheme of technical memory and its own conveniencies of reference! A dictionary in which (to carry on the metaphor) an Ainsworth arranges the contents by

ingly of the divine Philosopher must be explained, partly by the tone given to thinking minds by the Reformation, the founders and fathers of which saw in the Aristotelians, or schoolmen, the antagonists of Protestantism, and in the Italian Platonists the despisers and secret enemies of Christianity; and partly, by his having formed his notions of Plato's doc

Such is the doctrine of the Novum Organum of Lord Bacon, agreeing (as we shall more largely show in the text) in all essential points with the true doctrine of Plato, the apparent differences being for the greater part occasioned by the Grecian sage having applied his principles chiefly to the investigation of the mind, and the method of evolving its pow-trines from the absurdities and phantasms of his misinterpreers, and the English philosopher to the developement of na- ters, rather than from an unprejudiced study of the original ture. That our great countryman speaks too often detract- works.

the initials; a Walker by the endings; a Scapula by the radicals; and a Cominius by the similarity of the uses and purposes! The terms system, method, science, are mere improprieties of courtesy, when applied to a mass enlarging by endless oppositions, but without a nerve that oscillates, or a pulse that throbs, in sign of growth or inward sympathy. The innocent amusement, the healthful occupation, the ornamental accomplishment of amateurs (most honorable indeed and deserving all praise as a preventive substitute for the stall, the kennel, and the subscription-room), it has yet to expect the devotion and energies of the philosopher.

not to have it; which the memory feels but cannot
find. Thus, as “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,"
suggest each other to Shakspeare's Theseus, as soon
as his thoughts present him the ONE FORM, of which
they are but varieties; so water and flame, the dis-
mond, the charcoal, and the mantling champagne,
with its ebullient sparkles, are convoked and frater-
nized by the theory of the chemist. This is, in
truth, the first charm of chemistry, and the secret
of the almost universal interest excited by its dis-
coveries. The serious complacency which is afford-
ed by the sense of truth, utility, permanence, and
progression, blends with and enobles the exhilarating
surprise and the pleasurable sting of curiosity, which
accompany the propounding and the solving of an
Enigma. It is the sense of a principle of connection
given by the mind, and sanctioned by the corres-
pondency of nature. Hence the strong hold which
in all ages chemistry has had on the imagination. If
in SHAKSPEARE We find nature idealized into poetry,
through the creative power of a profound yet ob-
servant meditation, so through the meditative obser-
vation of a DAVY, a WOOLLASTON, or a HATCHETT ;
By some connatural force,
Powerful at greatest distance to unite

With secret amity things of like kind,"

we find poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature: yea, nature itself disclosed to us, GEMINAM istam naturam, quæ fit et facit, et creatur, as at once

So long back as the first appearance of Dr. Darwin's Phytonomia, the writer, then in earliest manhood, presumed to hazard the opinion, that the physiological botanists were hunting in a false direction, and sought for analogy where they should have looked for antithesis. He saw, or thought he saw, that the harmony between the vegetable and animal world, was not a harmony of resemblance, but of contrast; and their relation to each other that of corresponding opposites. They seemed to him (whose mind had been formed by observation, unaided, but at the same time unenthralled, by partial experiment) as two streams from the same fountain indeed, but flowing the one due west, and the other direct east; and that consequently, the resemblance would be as the proximity, greatest in the first and rudimental products of vegetable and animal organization. the poet and the poem! Whereas, according to the received notion, the highest and most perfect vegetable, and the lowest and rudest animal forms, ought to have seemed the links of the two systems, which is contrary to fact. Since that time, the same idea has dawned in the minds of philosophers capable of demonstrating its objective truth by induction of facts in an unbroken series of correspondences in nature. From these men, or from minds enkindled by their labors, we hope hereafter to receive it, or rather the yet higher idea to which it refers us, matured into laws of organic nature; and thence to have one other splendid proof, that with the knowledge of Law alone dwell Power and Prophecy, decisive Experiment, and, lastly, a scientific method, that dissipating with its earliest rays the gnomes of hypothesis and the mists of theory, may, within a single generation, open out on the philosophic seer discoveries that had baffled the gigantic, but blind and guideless industry of ages.

Such too, is the case with the assumed indecomposible substances of the LABORATORY. They are the symbols of elementary powers and the exponents of a law, which, as the root of all these powers, the chemical philosopher, whatever his theory may be, is instinctively laboring to extract. This instinct, again, is itself but the form, in which the idea, the mental Correlative of the law, first announces its incipient germination in his own mind: and hence proceeds the striving after unity of principle through all the diversity of forms, with a feeling resembling that which accompanies our endeavors to recollect a forgotten name; when we seem at once to have and

ESSAY VII.

Ταυιῆ τοίνῦν διαίρω χῶρις μὲν, οἷς νῦν δὴ ἔλεγες φιλο-
θεά μονάς τε, καὶ φιλοτέχνους, καὶ πρακτίκους, καὶ
χωρις αὖ πέρι ὧν ὁ λόγος, οἷς μόνους ἀν τὶς ἔρθως
προσείποι φιλοσόφους, ὡς μὲν γιγνωσκάντας, τίνος
ἔςιν ἐπις μη εκάςη τούτων τῶν ἐπισημων, ὁ τυγχάνει
ΠΛΑΤΩΝ.
ὂν ἄλλο αὐτὴς τῆςεπιςήμης.

(Translation.)

In the following then I distinguish, first,

those whom you indeed may call Philotheorists, or Philetechnists, or Practicians, and secondly those whom alone you may rightly denominate Philosophers, as knowing what the science of all these branches of science is, which may prove to be something more than the mere aggregate of the knowledges in any particular science. ——— PLATO.

FROM Shakspeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is easy, and the road is crowded with illustrations of our present subject. For of Plato's works, the larger and more valuable portion have all one common end, which comprehends and shines through the particular purpose of each several dialogue; and this is to establish the sources, to evolve the principles, and exemplify the art of METHOD. This is the clue, without which it would be difficult to exculpate the noblest productions of the divine philosopher from the charge of being tortuous and labyrinthine in their progress, and unsatisfactory in their ostensible results The latter indeed appear not seldom to have been

all other instances, it is itself a real or supposed phenomenon, and therefore a part of the problem which it is to solve. It may be among the foundation-stones of the edifice, but can never be the ground.

pro Quo of the simple objector. A mathematical submitting the phenomena to a scientific calculus In theoria seu contemplatio may therefore be perfect. For the mathematician can be certain, that he has contemplated all that appertains to his proposition. The celebrated EULER, treating on some point respecting arches, makes this curious remark, "All experience is in contradiction to this; sed potius fidendum est analysi; i. e. but this is no reason for doubting the analysis." The words sound paradoxical; but in truth mean no more than this, that the properties of space are not less certainly the properties of space because they can never be entirely transferred to material bodies. But in physics, that is, in all the sciences which have for their objects the things of nature, and not the entia rationis-more philosophically, intellectual acts and the products of those acts, existing exclusively in and for the intellect itself the definition must follow, and not precede the reasoning. It is representative not constitutive, and is indeed little more than an abbreviature of the preceding observation, and the deductions therefrom. But as the observation though aided by experiment, is necessarily limited and imperfect, the definition must be equally so. The history of theories, and the frequency of their subversion by the discovery of a single new fact, supply the best illustrations of this truth.*

As little can a true scientific method be grounded on an hypothesis, unless where the hypothesis is an exponential image or picture-language of an idea which is contained in it more or less clearly; or the symbol of an undiscovered law, like the characters of unknown quantities in algebra, for the purpose of

But in experimental philosophy, it may be said how much do we not owe to accident? Doubtless: but let it not be forgotten, that if the discoveries so made stop there; if they do not excite to some master IDEA; if they do not lead to some LAW (in whatever dress of theory or hypothesis the fashion and prejudices of the time may disguise or disfigure it: the discoveries may remain for ages limited in their uses, insecure and unproductive. How many centuries, we might have said millennia, have passed, since the first accidental discovery of the attraction and repulsion of light bodies by rubbed amber, &c. Compare the interval with the progress made within less than a century, after the discovery of the phenomena that led immediately to a THEORY of electricity. That here as in many other instances, the theory was supported by insecure hypotheses; that by one theorist two heterogeneous fluids are assumed, the vitreous and the resinous; by another, a plus and minus of the same fluid; that a third considers it a mere modification of light; while a fourth composes the electrical aura of oxygen, hydrogen, and caloric: this does but place the truth we have been evolving in a stronger and clearer light. For abstract from all these suppositions, or rather imaginations, that which is common to, and involved in them all ; and we shall have neither notional fluid or fluids, nor chemical compounds, nor elementary matter, but the idea of two-opposite -forces, tending to rest by equilibrium. These are the sole factors of the calculus, alike in all the theories. These give the law, and in it the method, both of arranging the phenomena and of substantiating appearances into facts of science; with a success proportionate to the clearness or confusedness of the insight into the law. For this reason, we anticipate the greatest improvements in the method, the nearest approaches to a system of electricity from these philosophers, who have presented the law most purely, and the correlative idea as an idea; those, namely, who, since the year 1798, in the true spirit of experi mental dynamics, rejecting the imagination of any material substrate, simple or compound, contemplate in the phenomena of electricity the operation of a law which reigns through all nature, the law of POLARITy, or the manifestation of one power by opposite forces: who trace in these appearances, as the most obvious and striking of its innumerable forms, the agency of the positive and negative poles of a power stable Theory can be constituted for the explanation of such changes."―Journal of Science and the Arts, No. vii. p. 103. essential to all material construction; the second, An intelligent friend, on reading the words "into one namely, of the three primary principles, for which the focus," observed: But what and where is the lens? I how-beautiful and most appropriate symbols are given by ever fully agree with the writer. All this and much more the mind in three ideal dimensions of space. must have been achieved before "a sound and stable Theory" could be" constituted "-which even then (except as far as it might occasion the discovery of a law) might possibly explain (ex plicis plana reddere,) but never account for, the facts in question. But the most satisfactory comment on these

The following extract from a most respectable scientific Journal contains an exposition of the impossibility of a perfect Theory in Physics, the more striking because it is directly against the purpose and intention of the writer. We content ourselves with one question, What if Kepler, what if Newton in his investigations concerning the Tides, had held themselves bound to this canon, and instead of propounding a law, had employed themselves exclusively in collecting materials for a Theory?

"The magnetic influence has long been known to have a variation which is constantly changing; but that change is so slow, and at the same time so different in various (different?) parts of the world, that it would be in vain to seek for the means of reducing it to established rules, until all its local and particular circumstances are clearly ascertained and recorded by accurate observations made in various parts of the globe. The necessity and importance of such observations are now pretty generally understood, and they have been actually carrying on for some years past; but these (and by parity of reason the incomparably greater number that remain to be made) must be collected, collated, proved, and afterwards brought together into one focus before ever a foundation can be formed upon which any thing like a sound and

and similar assertions would be afforded by a matter of fact history of the rise and progress, the accelerating and retarding momenta, of science in the civilized world.

The time is, perhaps, nigh at hand, when the same comparison between the results of two unequal periods; the interval between the knowledge of a fact, and that from the discovery of the law, will be ap plicable to the sister science of magnetism. But how great the contrast between magnetism and electrici

tionary condition of magnetism? As many theories, as many hypotheses, have been advanced in the lat ter science as in the former. But the theories and fictions of the electricians contained an idea, and all the same idea, which has necessarily led to METHOD; implicit indeed, and only regulative hitherto, which requires little more than the dismission of the ima gery to become constituent 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 indepen. dent axis) are but repetitions of the same fact or phenomenon looked at through a magnifying glass; the reiteration of the problem, not its solution. The na

city, at the present moment! From the remotest antiquity, the attraction of iron by the magnet was known and noticed; but century after century, it remained the undisturbed property of poets and orators. The fact of the magnet and the fable of phoenix stood on the same scale of utility. In the thirteenth century, or perhaps earlier, the polarity of the magnet and its communicability to iron was discovered; and soon stiggested a purpose so grand and important, that it may well be deemed the proudest trophy ever raised by accident* in the service of mankind-the invention of the compass. But it led to no idea, to no law, and consequently to no Method: though a variety of phenomena, as startling as they are mysterious, have forced on us a presentiment of its intimate connection with all the great agencies of nature; of a revelation, in ciphers, the key to which is still want-turalist, who cannot or will not see, that one fact is ing. We can recall no incident of human history that impresses the imagination more deeply than the moment when Columbus,† on an unknown ocean, first perceived one of these startling facts, the change of the magnetic needle!

In what shall we seek the cause of this contrast between the rapid progress of electricity and the sta

If accident it were: if the compass did not obscurely travel to us from the remotest east: if its existence there does not point to an age and a race, to which scholars of highest rank in the world of letters, Sir W. Jones, Bailly, Schlegel have attached faith! That it was known before the era generally assumed for its invention, and not spoken of as a novelty, has been proved by Mr. Southey and others.

It cannot be deemed alien from the purposes of this disquisition, if we are anxious to attract the attention of our readers to the importance of speculative meditation, even for the worldly interests of mankind; and to that concurrence of nature and historic event with the great revolutionary movements of individual genius, of which so many instances occur in the study of History--how nature (why should we hesitate in saying, that which in nature itself is more than nature?) seems to come forward in order to meet, to aid, and to reward every idea excited by a contemplation of her methods in the

spirit of filial care, and with the humility of love: It is with this view that we extract from an ode of Chiabrera's the following lines, which, in the strength of the thought and the lofty majesty of the poetry, has but "few peers in ancient or in modern song."

COLUMBUS.

Certo dal cor, ch' alto Destin non scelse,
Son l' imprese magnanime neglette;
Ma le bell' alme alle bell' opre elette
Sanno gioir nelle fatidhe eccelse:
Ne biasmo popolar, frale catena,
Spirto d' onore il suo cammin raffrena.
Cosi lunga stagion per modi indegni
Europa disprezzo l' inclita speme :
Schernendo il vulgo (e seco i Regi insieme)
Nudo nocchier promettitor di regni ;
Ma per le sconosciute onde marine

L' invitta prora ei pur sospinse al fine.
Qual nom, che torni al gentil consorte,
Tal ei da sua magion spiego l'antenne;
L' ocean corse, e i turbini sostenne,
Vinse le crude imagini di morte;
Poscia, dell' ampio mar spenta la guerra,
Scorse la dianzi favolosa Terra.
Allor dal cavo Pin scende veloce

E di grand' Orma il nuovo mondo imprime;
Ne men ratto per l'Aria erge sublime,
Segno del Ciel, insuperabil Croce;
E porse umile esempio, onde adorarla
Debba sua Gente. — CHIABRERA, vol. i.

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 protophenomenon ;) will never receive an auspicious answer from the oracle of na

ture.

ESSAY VIII.

The sun doth give

Brightness to the eye: and some may say that the sun
If not enlightened by the intelligence
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 centu"y, 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, 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 "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 aro 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