26 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



the lifting of pump-water, has been hitherto the demon- 

 strated rule of nature. So also as regards Pascal's 

 experiment. His experience has been the universj 

 experience ever since. Men have climbed mount 

 and gone up in balloons ; but no deviation from Pascal's 

 result has ever been observed. Barometers, like pum] 

 have refused to act ; but instead of indicating any sut 

 pension of the operations of nature, or any interference 

 on the part of its Author with atmospheric pressi 

 examination has in every instance fixed the anomalj 

 upon the instruments themselves. It is this welding 

 then, of rigid logic to verifying fact that Mr. Mozlej 

 refers to an ' unreasoning impulse.' 



Let us now briefly consider the case of Newtoi 

 Before his time men had occupied themselves with the 

 problem of the solar system. Kepler had deduced, from 

 a vast mass of observations, those general expressions of 

 planetary motion known as ' Kepler's laws.' It had 

 been observed that a magnet attracts iron ; and by one 

 of those flashes of inspiration which reveal to the human 

 mind the vast in the minute, the general in the parti- 

 cular, it had been inferred, that the force by which 

 bodies fall to the earth might also be an attraction. 

 Newton pondered all these things. He looked, as was 

 his wont, into the darkness until it became entirely 

 luminous. How this light arises we cannot explain; 

 but, as a matter of fact, it does arise. Let me remark 

 here, that this kind of pondering is a process with which 

 the ancients could have been but imperfectly acquainted. 

 They, for the most part, found the exercise of fantasy 

 more pleasant than careful observation, and subsequent 

 brooding over facts. Hence it is, that when those whose 

 education has been derived from the ancients speak of 

 1 the reason of man,' they are apt to omit from their 

 conception of reason one of its most important factors. 



