light bodies by rubbed amber! Compare the interval with the progress made within less than a century, after the discovery of the phænomena 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 phænomena 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, I 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 experimental dynamics, rejecting the imagination of any material substrate, simple or compound, contemplate in the phænomena 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 essential to all material construction; the second, namely, of the three primary principles, for which the beautiful and most appropriate symbols are given by the mind in the three ideal di mensions of space.* 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 Perhaps the attribution or analogy may seem fanciful at first sight, but I am in the habit of realizing to myself magnetism as length, electricity as breadth, and galvanism as depth." Table Talk, VI. 284.-Ed. the law,―will be applicable to the sister science of magnetism. But how great the contrast between magnetism and electricity at the present moment! From 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 the 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, were discovered; and soon suggested 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 phænomena, 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 wanting. I can recall no event of human history that impresses the imagination more deeply than the moment when Columbus,† on an un * 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 æra generally assumed for its invention, and not spoken of as a novelty, has been proved by Mr. Southey and others: (See the Omniana, vol. i. p. 210. No. 108,—where Mr. Southey quotes a passage from the Partidas (1250–7), very distinctly referring to the mariner's needle.-Ed.) It can not be deemed alien from the purposes of this disquisition, if I am anxious to attract the attention of my 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;-to point out how nature, or 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 I extract the following lines from an ode of Chiabrera's, which, in the strength of the thought and the lofty majesty of the poetry, has but "few peers in ancient or in modern song." Certo da cor, ch' alto destin non scelse, Son l'imprese magnanime neglette; Ma le bell' alme alle bell' Sanno gioir nelle fatiche eccelse ; known 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 stationary condition of magnetism? As many theories, as many hypotheses, have been advanced in the latter 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, but which requires little more than the dismission of the 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 can not 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 other 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 protophænomenon),-will never receive an auspicious answer from the oracle of nature. Cosi lunga stagion per modi indegni ESSAY VIII. The soul doth give Brightness to the eye: and some say, that the sun That doth inhabit it, would shine no more CARTWRIGHT's Lady-Errant, act iii. sc. iv. 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, I 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 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, that is, assertory, in Plato tentative, and (to adopt the Socratic phrase) obstetric. I am 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 ex hilarating, 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 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 to the injustice of the aspersions on the name and works of that 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 peruse 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, by Robert Hooke (the history of whose multifold inventions, and indeed of his whole philosophical life, is the best answer to the scheme, if 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. For though Bacon never so far deviates from his * The IIɛpì Xpwμáтwv is not now, I believe, considered genuine.-Ed. Nov. Org. Aph. LIV. William Gilbert died in 1603. His works are De Magnete, &c. 1600, and De Mundo, &c. 1651.-Ed, I refer the reader to Hooke's Posthumous Works (Hooke died in 1702. -Ed.) published under the auspices of the Royal Society, by their Secre |
