OF A SCIENTIFIC COSMOGRAPHY. 



23 



little to be wondered at, if, as finely observed 

 by Bruno("), '< Many regard philosophy as sus- 

 ceptible of no more than a sort of meteoric ex- 

 istence, so that even the larger and more re- 

 markable forms in which she has revealed her- 

 self to mankind share the fate of comets, which 

 are not regarded as belonging to the imperish- 

 able and eternal works of nature, but are mere- 

 ly reckoned among the number of fiery va- 

 pours." 



Misuse or misdirection of the mental ener- 

 gies, however, must not lead to any conclusions 

 tending to degrade intellect ; as if the world of 

 thought were, from its very nature, the realm 

 of phantasms and deceptions ; as if the pre- 



cious stores of empirical knowledge, which 

 have been accumulating for centuries, were 

 threatened by philosophy as by some hostile 

 power ! It becomes not the spirit of these 

 times to reject, as groundless hypothesis, eve- 

 ry generalization of ideas, every attempt, based 

 upon analogy and induction, to investigate the 

 concatenation of the phenomena of nature ; 

 and, among the noble faculties with which na- 

 ture has so wonderfully furnished man, to con- 

 demn at one time reason, inquiring, searching 

 every where for causal connections ; at an- 

 other imagination, the active, the exciting, 

 the indispensable to all invention, to all discov- 

 ery, 



