

EXAMPLES OF THE EXPLANATION OF LAWS. 539 



proportion to the pleasurable or painful character of the impres- 

 sions, being felt with peculiar force in the synchronous class 

 of associations ; it is remarked by the writer referred to, that 

 in minds of strong organic sensibility synchronous associations 

 will be likely to predominate, producing a tendency to conceive 

 things in pictures and in the concrete, richly clothed in attri- 

 butes and circumstances, a mental habit which is commonly 

 called Imagination, and is one of the peculiarities of the painter 

 and the poet ; while persons of more moderate susceptibility to 

 pleasure and pain will have a tendency to associate facts chiefly 

 in the order of their succession, and such persons, if they pos- 

 sess mental superiority, will addict themselves to history or 

 science rather than to creative art. This interesting specula- 

 tion the author of the present work has endeavoured, on an- 

 other occasion, to pursue farther, and to examine how far it 

 will avail towards explaining the peculiarities of the poetical 

 temperament.* It is at least an example which may serve, 

 instead of many others, to show the extensive scope which 

 exists for deductive investigation in the important and hitherto 

 so imperfect Science of Mind. 



7. The copiousness with which the discovery and ex- 

 planation of special laws of phenomena by deduction from 

 simpler and more general ones has here been exemplified, was 

 prompted by a desire to characterize clearly, and place in its 

 due position of importance, the Deductive Method ; which, in 

 the present state of knowledge, is destined henceforth irrevo- 

 cably to predominate in the course of scientific investigation. 

 A revolution is peaceably and progressively effecting itself in 

 philosophy, the reverse of that to which Bacon has attached 

 his name. That great man changed the method of the sciences 

 from deductive to experimental, and it is now rapidly reverting 

 from experimental to deductive. But the deductions which 

 Bacon abolished were from premises hastily snatched up, or 

 arbitrarily assumed. The principles were neither established 

 by legitimate canons of experimental inquiry, nor the results 



* Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i., fourth paper. 



