OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 97 



given for this important process ? We answer, None : 

 any more than (to pursue the illustration we have 

 already had recourse to) general rules can be laid 

 down by the chemist for the analysis of substances 

 of which all the ingredients are unknown. Such 

 rules, could they be discovered, would include the 

 whole of natural science; but we are very far, indeed, 

 from being able to propound them. However, we 

 are to recollect that the analysis of phenomena, 

 philosophically speaking, is principally useful, as it 

 enables us to recognize, and mark for special inves- 

 tigation, those which appear to us simple; to set me- 

 thodically about determining their laws, and thus to 

 facilitate the work of raising up general axioms, or 

 forms of words, which shall include the whole of 

 them; which shall, as it were, transplant them out of 

 the external into the intellectual world, render them 

 creatures of pure thought, and enable us to reason 

 them out a priori. And what renders the power of 

 doing this so eminently desirable is, that, in thus 

 reasoning back from generals to particulars, the pro- 

 positions at which we arrive apply to an immense 

 multitude of combinations and cases, which were 

 never individually contemplated in the mental pro- 

 cess by which our axioms were first discovered; and 

 that, consequently, when our reasonings are pushed 

 to the utmost limit of particularity, their results 

 appear in the form of individual facts, of which we 

 might have had no knowledge from immediate expe- 

 rience; and thus we are not only furnished with the 

 explanation of all known facts, but with the actual 

 discovery of such as were before unknown. A re- 

 markable example of this has already been mentioned 



