WHEWELL'S WRITINGS AND CORRESPONDENCE. 529 



But the chief characteristic of Dr Whewell's intellectual life seems to have 

 been the energy and perseverance with which he pursued the development of 

 each of the great ideas which had in the course of his life presented itself to 

 him. Of these ideas some might be greater than others, but all were large. 



The special pursuit, therefore, to which he devoted himself was the elabora- 

 tion and the expression of the ideas appropriate to different branches of 

 knowledge. The discovery of a new fact, the invention of a theory, the solution 

 of a problem, the filling up of a gap in an existing science, were interesting 

 to him not so much for their own sake as additions to the general stock of 

 knowledge, as for their illustrative value as characteristic instances of the 

 processes by which all human knowledge is developed. 



To watch the first germ of an appropriate idea as it was developed either 

 in his own mind or in the writings of the founders of the sciences, to frame 

 appropriate and scientific words in which the idea might be expressed, and then 

 to construct a treatise in which the idea should be largely developed and the 

 appropriate words copiously exemplified such seems to have been the natural 

 channel of his intellectual activity in whatever direction it overflowed. When 

 any of his great works had reached this stage he prepared himself for some 

 other labour, and if new editions of his work were called for, the alterations 

 which he introduced often rather tended to destroy than to complete the unity 

 of the original plan. 



Mr Todhunter has given us an exhaustive account of Dr "Whewell's writings 

 and scientific work, and in this we may easily trace the leading ideas which 

 he successively inculcated as a writer. We can only share Mr Todhunter's regret 

 that it is only as a writer that he appears in this book, and it is to be 

 hoped that the promised account of his complete life as a man may enable us 

 to form a fuller conception of the individuality and unity of his character, which 

 it is hard to gather from the multifarious collection of his books. 



Dr Whewell first appears before us as the author of a long series of 

 text-books on Mechanics. His position as a tutor of his College, and the 

 interest which he took in University education, may have induced him to spend 

 more time in the composition of elementary treatises than would otherwise have 

 been congenial to him, but in the prefaces to the different editions, as well 

 as in the introductory chapters of each treatise, he shews that sense of the 

 intellectual and educational value of the study of first principles which dis- 

 tinguishes all his writings. It is manifest from his other writings, that the 



= VOL. II. 67 



