into. We have also other faculties, which, being original and indecomposable, resist all inductive treatment, and can neither be resolved into simpler elements, nor referred to more general laws. To this class, Reid assigns Memory, 134 Perception, 135 Desire of Self-Approbation,136 and not only Instinct, but even Habit.137 Many of our ideas, such as those concerning Space and Time, are equally original;138 and other first principles there are, which have not been enunciated, but from which we may reason.139 139 They, therefore, are the major premisses of the argument; no reason having yet been given for them, they must be simple; and not having yet been explained, they are, of course, inexplicable.140

All this is arbitrary enough. Still, in justice to Reid, it must be said, that, having made these assumptions, he displayed remarkable ability in arguing from them, and that, in attacking the philosophy of his time, he subjected it to a criticism, which has been extremely serviceable. His lucidity, his dialectic skill, and the racy and masculine style in which he wrote, made him a formid

by the most abject superstition, or the most frantic enthusiasm, had never seen the light. Reid's Inquiry, p. 45.

134 Reid's Essays, vol. i. pp. 329, 334; vol. ii. p. 247.

135 Reid's Essays, vol. i. pp. 9, 71, 303, 304.

126 Reid's Essays, vol. ii. p. 60.

137❝I see no reason to think, that we shall ever be able to assign the physical cause, either of instinct, or of the power of habit. Both seem to be parts of our original constitution. Their end and use is evident; but we can assign no cause of them, but the will of Him who made us." Reid's Essays, vol. iii. p. 119.

138 I know of no ideas or notions that have a better claim to be accounted simple and original, than those of space and time." Reid's Eways, vol. i. p. 354.

139I do not at all affirm that those I have mentioned are all the first principles from which we may reason concerning contingent truths. Such enumerations, even when made after much reflection, are seldom perfect." Reid's Essays, vol. ii. p. 270.

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'Why sensation should compel our belief of the present existence of the thing, memory a belief of its past existence, and imagination no belief at all, I believe no philosopher can give a shadow of reason, but that such is the nature of these operations. They are all simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind." Reid's Inquiry, p. 40. "We can give no reason why the retina is, of all parts of the body, the only one on which pictures made by the rays of light cause vision; and therefore we must resolve this solely into a law of our constitution." p. 258.

able opponent, and secured to his objections a respectful hearing. To me, however, it appears, that notwithstanding the attempts, first of M. Cousin, and afterwards of Sir William Hamilton, to prop up his declining reputation, his philosophy, as an independent system, is untenable, and will not live. In this I may be mistaken; but what is quite certain is, that nothing can be more absurd than to suppose, as some have done, that he adopted the inductive, or, as it is popularly called, Baconian method. Bacon, indeed, would have smiled at such a disciple, assuming all sorts of major premisses, taking general principles for granted with the greatest recklessness, and reserving his skill for the task of reasoning from propositions for which he had no evidence, except that on a cursory, or, as he termed it, a common-sense, inspection, they appeared to be true.141 This refusal to analyze preconceived notions, comes under the head of what Bacon stigmatized as the anticipatio naturæ, and which he deemed the great enemy of knowledge, on account of the dangerous confidence it places in the spontaneous and uncorrected conclusions of the human mind. When, therefore, we find Reid holding up the Baconian philosophy, as a pattern which it behoved all inquirers to follow;142 and when we, moreover, find Dugald Stewart,

141 In a recent work of distinguished merit, an instance is given of the loose manner in which he took for granted that certain phenomena were ultimate, in order that, instead of analyzing them, he might reason from them. "Dr. Reid has no hesitation in classing the voluntary command of our organs, that is, the sequence of feeling and action implied in all acts of will, among instincts. The power of lifting a morsel of food to the mouth, is, according to him, an instinctive or pre-established conjunction of the wish and the deed; that is to say, the emotional state of hunger, coupled with the sight of a piece of bread, is associated, through a primitive link of the mental constitution, with the several movements of the hand, arm, and mouth, concerned in the act of eating. This assertion of Dr. Reid's may be simply met by appealing to the facts. It is not true that human beings possess, at birth, any voluntary command of their limbs whatsoever. A babe of two months old cannot use its hands in obedience to its desires. The infant can grasp nothing, hold nothing, can scarcely fix its eyes on any thing." "If the more perfect command of our voluntary movements implied in every art be an acquisition, so is the less perfect command of these movements that grows upon a child during the first year of life." Bain on the Senses and the Intellect, London, 1855, pp. 292, 293.

142 See Reid's Inquiry, pp. 436, 446, as well as other parts of his works:

who, though a somewhat superficial thinker, was, at all events, a careful writer, supposing that Reid had followed it,143 we meet with fresh proof of how difficult it was for Scotchmen of the last age to imbibe the true spirit of inductive logic, since they believed, that a system which flagrantly violated its rules, had been framed in strict accordance with them.

Leaving mental philosophy, I now come to physical science, in which, if any where, we might expect that the inductive plan would predominate, and would triumph over the opposite, or deductive, one. How far this was the case, I will endeavour to ascertain, by an examination of the most important discoveries which have been made by Scotchmen concerning the organic and inorganic world. And, as my object is merely to indicate the turn and character of the Scotch mind, I shall avoid all details respecting the practical effects of those discoveries, and shall confine myself to such a narration as will exhibit their purely scientific aspect, so as to enable the reader to understand what additions were made to our knowledge of the laws of nature, and in what way the additions were made. The character of each discovery, and its process, will be stated, but nothing more. Neither here, nor in any part of this Introduction, do I pretend to investigate questions of practical utility, or to trace the connexion between the dis

see also an extract from one of his letters to Dr. Gregory, in Stewart's Biographical Memoirs, p. 432.

143 The idea of prosecuting the study of the human mind on a plan analogous to that which had been so successfully adopted in physics by the followers of Lord Bacon, if not first conceived by Dr. Reid, was, at least, first carried successfully into execution in his writings.' Stewart's Biographical Memoirs, p. 419. "The influence of the general views opened in the Novum Organon, may be traced in almost every page of his writings; and, indeed, the circumstance by which they are so strongly and characteristically distinguished, is that they exhibit the first systematical attempt to exemplify, in the study of human nature, the same plan of investigation which conducted Newton to the properties of light, and to the law of gravitation." p. 421. From this passage one might hazard a supposition that Dugald Stewart did not understand Bacon much better than he did Aristotle or Kant. Of the two last most profound thinkers, he certainly knew little or nothing, except what he gathered secondhand. Consequently, he underrates them.

coveries of science and the arts of life. That I shall do in the body of the work itself, where I hope to explain a number of minute social events, many of which are regarded as isolated, if not incongruous. For the present, I solely aim at those broad principles, which, by marking out the epochs of thought, underlie the whole fabric of society, and which must be clearly apprehended before history can cease to be a mere empirical assemblage of facts, of which the scientific basis being unsettled, the true order and coherence must be unknown.

Among the sciences which concern the inorganic world, the laws of heat occupy a conspicuous place. On the one hand, they are connected with geology, being intimately allied, and, indeed, necessarily bound up, with every speculation respecting the changes and present condition of the crust of the earth. On the other hand, they touch the great questions of life, both animal and vegetable; they have to do with the theory of species, and of race; they modify soil, food, and organization; and to them we must look for valuable help towards solving those great problems in biology, which, of late years, have occupied the attention of the boldest and most advanced philosophers.

Our present knowledge of the laws of heat, may be briefly stated as branching into five fundamental divisions. These are: latent heat; specific heat; the conduction of heat; the radiation of heat; and, finally, the undulatory theory of heat; by which last, we are gradually discarding our old material views, and are accustoming ourselves to look upon heat as simply one of the forms of force, all of which, such as light, electricity, magnetism, motion, gravitation, and chemical affinity, are constantly assuming each other's shape, but, in their total amount, are incapable either of increase or of diminution.144 This grand conception, which is now placing

144 The theory of the indestructibility of force has been applied to the law of gravitation by Professor Faraday, in his Discourse on the Conservation of Force, 1857; an essay full of thought and power, and which should be carefully studied by every one who wishes to understand the direction

the indestructibility of force on the same ground as the indestructibility of matter, has an importance far above its scientific value, considerable as that undoubtedly is. For, by teaching us, that nothing perishes, but that, on the contrary, the slightest movement of the smallest body, in the remotest region, produces results which are perpetual, which diffuse themselves through all space, and which, though they may be metamorphosed, cannot be destroyed, it impresses us with such an exalted idea of the regular and compulsory march of physical affairs, as must eventually influence other and higher departments of inquiry. Our habits of thought are so connected and interwoven, that notions of law and of the necessary concatenation of things, can never be introduced into one field of speculation, without affecting other fields which lie contiguous to it. When, therefore, the modern doctrine of conservation of force,145 becomes

which the highest speculations of physical science are now taking. I will quote only one passage from the opening, to give the reader an idea of its general scope, irrespective of the more special question of gravitation. "The progress of the strict science of modern times has tended more and more to produce the conviction that force can neither be created nor destroyed; and to render daily more manifest the value of the knowledge of that truth in experimental research.". Agreeing with those who admit the conservation of force to be a principle in physics, as large and sure as that of the indestructibility of matter, or the invariability of gravity, I think that no particular idea of force has a right to unlimited or unqualified acceptance, that does not include assent to it."

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145 As an illustration of this doctrine, I cannot do better than quote the following passage from one of the most suggestive and clearly reasoned books which has been written in this century by an English physicist : "Wave your hand; the motion which has apparently ceased, is taken up by the air, from the air by the walls of the room, &c., and so by direct and reacting waves, continually comminuted, but never destroyed. It is true that, at a certain point, we lose all means of detecting the motion, from its minute subdivision, which defies our most delicate means of appreciation, but we can indefinitely extend our power of detecting it accordingly as we confine its direction, or increase the delicacy of our examination. Thus, if the hand be moved in unconfined air, the motion of the air would not be sensible to a person at a few feet distance; but if a piston of the same extent of surface as the hand he moved with the same rapidity in a tube, the blast of air may be distinctly felt at several yards distance. There is no greater absolute amount of motion in the air in the second than in the first case, but its direction is restrained, so as to make its means of detection more facile. By carrying on this restraint, as in the air gun, we get a power of detecting the motion, and of moving other bodies at far greater distances. The puff of air which would in the air-gun project a bullet a