OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 71 



accumulated experience, the art is empirical ; but 

 if it be experience reasoned upon and brought un- 

 der general principles, it assumes a higher character, 

 and becomes a scientific art. In the progress of 

 mankind from barbarism to civilised life, the arts 

 necessarily precede science. The wants and crav- 

 ings of our animal constitution must be satisfied; 

 the comforts, and some of the luxuries, of life must 

 exist. Something must be given to the vanity of 

 show, and more to the pride of power : the round 

 of baser pleasures must have been tried and found 

 insufficient, before intellectual ones can gain a foot- 

 ing ; and when they have obtained it, the delights 

 of poetry and its sister arts still take precedence of 

 contemplative enjoyments, and the severer pursuits 

 of thought ; and when these in time begin to charm 

 from their novelty, and sciences begin to arise, they 

 will at first be those of pure speculation. The mind 

 delights to escape from the trammels which had 

 bound it to earth, and luxuriates in its newly found 

 powers. Hence, the abstractions of geometry 

 the properties of numbers the movements of the 

 celestial spheres whatever is abstruse, remote, and 

 extramundane become the first objects of infant 

 science. Applications come late : the arts continue 

 slowly progressive, but their realm remains separated 

 from that of science by a wide gulf which can only 

 be passed by a powerful spring. They form their own 

 language and their own conventions, which none but 

 artists can understand. The whole tendency of 

 empirical art, is to bury itself in technicalities, and 

 to place its pride in particular short cuts and mys- 

 teries known only to adepts ; to surprise and astonish 



