7 
ADDRESS. xli 
and responded to from a quarter where, perhaps, any sympathy in this respect 
might hardly have been looked for. The philosophical mind of Germany has 
begun, at length, effectually to awaken from the dreamy trance in which it 
had been held for the last half-century, and in which the jargon of the Abso- 
lutists and Ontologists had been received as oracular. An “ anti-speculative 
philosophy ” has arisen and found supporters—rejected, indeed, by the Onto- 
logists, but yearly gaining ground in the general mind. It is something so 
new for an English and a German philosopher to agree in their estimate 
either of the proper objects of speculation or of the proper mode of pursuing 
them, that we greet, not without some degree of astonishment, the appearance 
of works like the Logic and the New Psychology of Beneke, in which this 
false and delusive philosophy is entirely thrown aside, and appeal at once 
made to the nature of things as we find them, and to the laws of our in- 
tellectual and moral nature, as our own consciousness and the history of 
mankind reveal them to us*. 
Meanwhile, the fact is every year becoming more broadly manifest, by the 
successful application of scientific principles to subjects which had hitherto 
been only empirically treated (of which agriculture may be taken as perhaps 
the most conspicuous instance), that the great work of Bacon was not the 
completion, but, as he himself foresaw and foretold, only the commencement 
of his own philosophy ; and that we are even yet only at the threshold of that 
palace of Truth which succeeding generations will range over as their own 
—a world of scientific inquiry, in which not matter only and its properties, 
but the far more rich and complex relations of life and thought, of passion 
and motive, interest and actions, will come to be regarded as its legitimate 
objects. Nor let us fear that in so regarding them we run the smallest danger 
of collision with any of those great principles which we regard, and rightly 
regard, as sacred from question. A faithful and undoubting spirit carried 
into the inquiry will secure us from such dangers, and guide us, like an in- 
stinct, in our paths through that vast and entangled region which intervenes 
between those ultimate princinles and their extreme practical applications. 
It is only by working our way upwards towards those principles as well as 
downwards from them, that we can ever hope to penetrate such intricacies 
and thread their maze; and it would be worse than folly—it would be treason 
against all our highest feelings—to doubt that to those who spread themselves 
over these opposite lines, each moving in his own direction, a thousand points 
of meeting and mutual and joyful recognition will occur. 
But if Science be really destined to expand its scope, and embrace objects 
beyond the range of merely material relation, it must not altogether and 
obstinately refuse, even within the limits of such relations, to admit conceptions 
which at first sight may seem to trench upon the immaterial, such as we have 
been accustomed to regard it. The time seems to be approaching when a 
merely mechanical view of nature will become impossible—when the notion 
of accounting for a// the phenomena of nature, and even of mere physics, 
by simple attractions and repulsions fixedly and unchangeably inherent in 
material centres (granting any conceivable system of Boscovichian alterna- 
tions), will be deemed untenable. Already we have introduced the idea of 
heat-atmospheres about particles to vary their repulsive forces according to 
definite laws. But surely this can only be regarded as one of those provi- 
sional and temporary conceptions, which, though it may be useful as helping 
us to laws and as suggesting experiments, we must be prepared to resign if 
ever such ideas, for instance, as radiant stimulus or conducted influence 
* Vide Beneke, Neue Psychologie, s. 300 ef seg. for an admirable view of the state of 
metaphysical and logical philosophy in England. f 
