So long back as the first appearance of Dr. Darwin's Phytologia, I, 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. I saw, or thought I saw, that the harmony between the vegetable and animal world, was not a harmony of resemblance, but of contrast; and that their relation to each other was that of corresponding opposites. They seemed to me, 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. 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 may 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 indecomponible 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 *1801. The Zoonomia was published in 1793.-Ed. which accompanies our endeavors to recollect a forgotten name; when we seem at once to have and not to have it; which the memory feels but can not find. Thus, as "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, ""* suggest each the other to Shakspeare's Theseus, as soon as his thoughts present to him the one form, of which they are but varieties; so water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal, and the mantling champagne, with its ebullient sparkles, are convoked and fraternized 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 discoveries. The serious complacency which is afforded by the sense of truth, utility, performance, and progression, blends with and ennobles 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 correspondency 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 observant meditation, so through the meditative observation of a Davy, a Wollaston, or a Hatchett; By some connatural force, 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 creat et creatur, as at once the poet and the poem. * Mids. Night's Dream, act v. sc. 1.—Ed. ESSAY VII. Ταυτῇ τοινῦν διαίρω χῶρις μὲν, οὖς νῦν δὴ ἔλεγες φιλοθεάμονάς τε, καὶ φιλοτέχνους, καὶ πρακτίκους, καὶ χῶρις αὖ περὶ ὧν ὁ λόγος, οὖς μόνους ἀν τὶς ὄρθως προσείποι φιλοσόφους, ὡς μὲν γιγνώσκοντας, τίνος ἔςιν ἐπιςήμμ ἑκάςη πούτων τῶν ἐπισήμων, ὁ τυγχάνει ἄν ἄλλο αὐτῆς τῆς ἐπιςήμης· PLATO. In the following then I distinguish, first, those whom you indeed may call philotheorists, or philotechnists, 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 knowledge in any particular science. 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 drawn for the purpose of starting a new problem, rather than that of solving the one proposed as the subject of the previous discussion. But with the clear insight that the purpose of the writer is not so much to establish any particular truth, as to remove the obstacles, the continuance of which is preclusive of all truth, the whole scheme assumes a different aspect, and justifies itself in all its dimensions. We see, that to open anew a well of springing water, not to cleanse the stagnant tank, or fill, bucket by bucket, the leaden cistern; that the education of the intellect, by awakening the principle and method of self-development, was his proposed object, not any specific information that can be conveyed into it from without;-not to assist in storing the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting-room, but to place it in such relations of circumstance as should gradually excite the germinal power that craves no knowledge but what it can take up into itself, what it can appropriate, and reproduce in fruits of its own. To shape, to dye, to paint over, and to mechanize the mind, he resigned, as their proper trade, to the sophists, against whom he waged open and unremitting war. For the ancients, as well as the moderns, had their machinery for the extemporaneous mintage of intellects, by means of which, off-hand, as it were, the scholar was enabled to make a figure on any and all subjects, on any and all occasions. They too had their glittering vapors, which (as the comic poet tells us) fed a host of sophists tary detention to have been again let go as if the words of the charm had been incomplete, and it had appeared at its own will only to mock his calling. At length, in the astonishing preparations for his museum, he constructed it for the scientific apprehension out of the unspoken alphabet of nature. Yet notwithstanding the imperfection in the annunciation of the idea, how exhilarating have been the results! I dare appeal to* Abernethy, to Everard Home, to Hatchett, whose communication to Sir Everard on the egg and its analogies, in a recent paper of the latter (itself of high excellence) in the Philosophical Transactions, I may point out as being, in the proper sense of the term, the development of a fact in the history of physiology, and to which I refer as exhibiting a luminous instance of what I mean by the discovery of a central phænomenom. To these I appeal, whether whatever is grandest in the views of Cuvier be not either a reflection of this light or a continuation of its rays, well and wisely directed through fit media to the appropriate object.† We have seen that a previous act and conception of the mind is indispensable even to the mere semblances of method; that neither fashion, mode, nor orderly arrangement can be produced without a prior purpose, and a pre-cogitation ad intentionem ejus quod quæritur, though this purpose may have been itself excited, and this pre-cogitation itself abstracted from the perceived likenesses and differences of the objects to be arranged. But it has likewise been shown, that fashion, mode, ordonnance, are not method, inasmuch as all method supposes a principle of unity with progression; in other words, progressive transition without breach of continuity. But such a principle, it has been proved, * Since this was written, Mr. Abernethy has realized this anticipation, dictated solely by my wishes, and at the time justified only by my general admiration of Mr. A.'s talents and principles, and composed without the least knowledge that he was then actually engaged in proving the assertion here hazarded, at large and in detail. See his eminent Treatise on Physiology, 1821. Nor should it be wholly unnoticed, that Cuvier, who, I understand, was not born in France, and is not of unmixed French extraction, had prepared himself for his illustrious labors (as I learn from a reference in the first chapter of his great work, and should have concluded from the general style of thinking, though the language betrays suppression, as of one who doubted the sympathy of his readers or audience) in a very different school of methodology and philosophy than any which Paris could have afforded. |