1830.] The Progress of Physical Discovery. 275 



philosophy or sciences, but are more common, and of a higher stage ;" 

 and he instances as examples, the Persian magic, which consisted in the 

 reduction of the principles of nature, to the rules and policy of govern- 

 ments, and the resemblance of the quavering of a stop in music, to the 

 playing of light upon the water. The Philosophia Prima of Bacon seems, 

 in fact, almost as comprehensive as the Natural Philosophy of Schelling. 

 It is the parent of all knowledge ; and, so far from being confounded with 

 metaphysics, Lord Bacon took extraordinary pains to distinguish it from 

 the latter, and to place metaphysics as a branch of natural science. 

 Physics, then, are situated at a middle distance between natural history, 

 which classifies and arranges things, and metaphysics, which, in Bacon's 

 phraseology, describes tlieir t fixed and constant, as opposed to their varia- 

 ble and respective, causes. To attempt to assign to each of these its re- 

 spective importance is not our present business, we are only desirous to 

 state our conviction, that a just conception of the harmony of nature 

 must necessarily be founded upon metaphysics as well as the natural and 

 physical sciences, and that each branch is only valuable in so far as it 

 tends to such a conception. To seize every opportunity of impressing 

 this truth upon physical investigators, seems tenfold more important now 

 than in the days of Bacon, when he declared, " that natural history, 

 physics, and metaphysics, were like the three acclamations, ' Sancte, 

 sancte, sancte' holy in the description of God's works holy in the con- 

 nection of them, and holy in the union of them in a perpetual and uniform 

 law." 



Those who gainsay the influence of imagination upon the success of 

 physical investigations, forget, that it is no part of the experimental 

 method to conceive any thing farther than experience has already de- 

 monstrated. The principle of gravitation would never have been known 

 to Newton had not his consciousness first imagined its possibility, which 

 excited him to prove, by experiment, its truth or falsehood. It is not, 

 therefore, solely to induction that we are indebted for this or any other 

 discovery. Former experience, indeed, forms the basis upon which the 

 imagination rears itself, which, in its turn, requires experience to render 

 it a substantial fabric ; but experience alone is as wholly incapable of 

 generating any thing new as an organized body, whose life has fled, is 

 of propagating its kind. 



The operation of the imagination, then, is mysterious ; but is not life 

 also a great mystery ? Will the vital principle ever be disclosed to us 

 by chemistry, or the soul be detected by analyzation ? If we feel within 

 us the uniformity of the law of creation the harmony of nature with 

 our own minds the analogy of forms, of sounds, and colours the rela- 

 tion that a noble poem bears to a fine picture or statue the connection 

 between sadness and clouds between rage and the stormy sea between 

 joy and the sunbeam ; if we perceive the resemblance of the history 

 of a nation to that of man of the course of a river to the course of hu- 

 man life of the succession of the seasons of the year to the succession of 

 our own infancy and manhood, our decline and decay ; if, in short, we 

 have any notion of that kind of likeness which schoolboys call a simile, 

 we should think it absurd to require experimental proof of the resem- 

 blance, when we have a far more convincing evidence of it in the depth 

 of our own sentiments. 



If we are asked, what are the qualities which peculiarly fit a man for 



2 N 2 



