THE BEL FAST A DDBS8SL 455 



exist, and showed on general principles why animals must 

 have such and such parts. When an eminent contemporary 

 philosopher, who is far removed from errors of this kind, 

 remembers these abuses of the a priori method, he will be 

 able to make allowance for the jealousy of physicists as to 

 the acceptance of so-called a priori truths. Aristotle's 

 errors of detail, as shown by Encken and Lange, were grave 

 and numerous. He affirmed that only in man we had the 

 beating of the heart, that the left side of the body was 

 colder than the right, that men have more teeth than 

 women, and that there is an empty space at the back of 

 every man's head. 



There is one essential quality in physical conceptions, 

 which was entirely wanting in those of Aristotle and his 

 followers a capability of being placed as coherent pictures 

 before the mind. The Germans express the act of picturing 

 by the word vorstellen, and the picture they call a Vorstel- 

 lung. We have no word in English which comes nearer to 

 our requirements than Imagination; and, taken with its 

 proper limitations, the word answers very well. But it is 

 tainted by its associations, and therefore objectionable to 

 some minds. Compare, with reference to this capacity of 

 mental presentation, the case of the Aristotelian, who 

 refers the ascent of water in a pump to Nature's abhorrence 

 of a vacuum, with that of Pascal when he proposed to solve 

 the question of atmospheric pressure by the ascent of the 

 Puy de Dome. In the one case the terms of the explanation 

 refuse to fall into place as a physical image; in the other the 

 image is distinct, the descent and rise of the barometer 

 being clearly figured beforehand as the balancing of two 

 varying and opposing pressures. 



SECTIOH 3. During the drought of the middle ages in 

 Christendom, the Arabian intellect, as forcibly shown by 

 Draper, was active. With the intrusion of the Moors into 

 Spain, order, learning and refinement took the place of 

 their opposites. When smitten with disease, the Christian 

 peasant resorted to a shrine, the Moorish one to an 

 instructed physician. The Arabs encouraged translations 

 from the Greek philosophers, but not from the Greek 

 poets. They turned in disgust " from the lewd ness of our 

 classical mythology, and denounced as an unpardonable 

 blasphemy all connection between the impure Olympian 



