CHAPTER III. 



THAT THERE IS, OR MAY BE, A SCIENCE OF HUMAN 

 NATURE. 



1. IT is a common notion, or at least it is implied in 

 many common modes of speech, that the thoughts, feelings, 

 and actions of sentient beings are not a subject of science, in 

 the same strict sense in which this is true of the objects of 

 outward nature. This notion seems to involve some confusion 

 of ideas, which it is necessary to begin by clearing up. 



Any facts are fitted, in themselves, to be a subject of 

 science, which follow one another according to constant laws ; 

 although those laws may not have been discovered, nor even 

 be discoverable by our existing resources. Take, for instance, 

 the most familiar class of meteorological phenomena, those of 

 rain and sunshine. Scientific inquiry has not yet succeeded 

 in ascertaining the order of antecedence and consequence 

 among these phenomena, so as to be able, at least in our 

 regions of the earth, to predict them with certainty, or even 

 with any high degree of probability. Yet no one doubts that 

 the phenomena depend on laws, and that these must be deri- 

 vative laws resulting from known ultimate laws, those of heat, 

 electricity, vaporization, and elastic fluids. Nor can it be 

 doubted that if we were acquainted with all the antecedent 

 circumstances, we could, even from those more general laws, 

 predict (saving difficulties of calculation) the state of the 

 weather at any future time. Meteorology, therefore, not only 

 has in itself every natural requisite for being, but actually is, a 

 science ; though, from the difficulty of observing the facts on 

 which the phenomena depend (a difficulty inherent in the 

 peculiar nature of those phenomena) the science is extremely 

 imperfect ; and were it perfect, might probably be of little avail 



