28 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



end sought in each case is the same — that is, to change all 

 these physical utterances of Nature into Idea, and to secure 

 for this Idea a method of expression involving the least pos- 

 yible materiality of symbol — that is, to change individual facts 

 and phenomena into general principles, which, because ab- 

 stract, are unchangeable. When this has been done, the work 

 of the Naturalist ceases, but the work of Man, the Thinker is 

 not done; it is only just begun. By assuming the ultimate 

 expressions of the various natural sciences as individual and 

 not as typiiial, we can treat the truths reached by them pre- 

 cisely as the Botanist treated plants, and, rejecting points of 

 of difference, may find in them all some central idea. This is 

 the province of the metaphysician. Hs seeks the law of Idea, 

 he determines the law of Thinking, j ust as all other laws are de- 

 termined, from a study of the symbols formulating its expres- 

 sion in Nature. When this law has been distinctly enunciated, 

 and freed from all intermixture with the contingent, then the 

 work of the metaphysician ceases, the summum genus has been 

 reached. The truths communicated in the symbols of Nature, 

 have been correlated and enunciated, and finally translated 

 from the dialect of man the physical into the language of man 

 the intellectual. Physical science determines the separate 

 words of this message of God, the letters of which are scattered 

 throughout Nature. Metaphysics combines these words into 

 propositions which enunciate a distinct truth. There is there- 

 fore neither conflict nor variation between the method of Logic 

 and the method of Nature. The movement of both is in the 

 same direction ; the only difference is in the point of starting. 

 And another truth no less important, which follows from the 

 foregoing discussion, is that the method of Nature is funda- 

 mental to the method of Logic. Physics should precede meta- 

 physics, but not exclude it ; both are essential to every true 

 science, and physics, v/hich stops with physics, leads man by 

 dazzling promises into some Utopian desert only to leave him 

 there to die of hunger. And it is no less true that metaphys- 



