66 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



" rests upon no rational grounds, and can be traced to no 

 rational principle ; " which possesses " no intellectual char- 

 acter;" which "philosophy" has uprooted from "the 

 ground of reason," and fixed in that " large irrational de- 

 partment " discovered for it by Mr. Mozley, in the hitherto 

 unexplored wildernesses of the human mind. 



The proper function of the inductive principle, or the 

 -belief in the order of Nature, says Mr. Mozley, is " to act 

 as a practical basis for the affairs of life, and the carrying 

 on of human society." But what, it may be asked, has the 

 planet Neptune, or the belts of Jupiter, or the whiteness 

 about the poles of Mars, to do with the affairs of society ? 

 How is society affected by the fact that the sun's atmos- 

 phere contains sodium, or that the nebula of Orion contains 

 hydrogen gas ? Nineteen-twentieths of the force employed 

 in the exercise of the inductive principle, which, reiterates 

 Mr. Mozley, is "purely practical," have been expended upon 

 subjects as unpractical as these. What practical interest 

 has society in the fact that the spots on the sun have a 

 decennial period, and that when a magnet is closely 

 watched for half a century, it is found to perform small 

 motions which synchronize with the appearance and disap- 

 pearance of the solar spots ? And yet, I doubt not, Sir 

 Edward Sabine would deem a life of intellectual toil amply 

 rewarded by being privileged to solve, at its close, these 

 infinitesimal motions. 



The inductive principle is founded in man's desire to 

 know a desire arising from his position among phenom- 

 ena which are reducible to order by his intellect. The 

 material universe is the complement of the intellect, and 

 without the study of its laws reason would never have 

 awoke to its higher forms of self-consciousness at all. It 

 is the non-ego, through and by which the ego is endowed 

 with self-discernment. We hold it to be an exercise of 

 reason to explore the meaning of a universe to which we 



