BLACK. 17 



s. Ixiv. Ixxiii.*). But I have preferred taking the 

 account of chemical science from the * Encyclopedic,' 

 first, because it gives, if not the opinion or the testi- 

 mony of the learned body at large who prepared that 

 work, yet certainly an opinion and a testimony which 

 had the sanction of its more eminent members ; and, 

 secondly, because its date is at the eve of the great 

 revolution in natural science of which we are speaking. 

 The last passage which has been cited from that work 

 strikingly illustrates the low ebb at which chemical 

 science then was. It is certain that after the discov- 

 eries of Black had opened vast and new views of nature, 

 both as regards the operations of heat, the most power- 

 ful and universal of all agents, and as regards the con- 

 stitution of elastic fluids, the most unknown of the four 

 elements, no natural philosopher would have had the 

 hardihood to doubt if chemistry was an important 

 branch of his science, and no chemist would have 

 performed the superfluous task of vindicating its claim 

 to the title. 



* " Itaque tails philosophia (in paucorum experimentorum argutiis et 

 obscuritate fundata) illis qui in hujusmodi experiments quotidie vevsantur 

 atque ex ipsis phantasmatis contaminarunt, probabilis videtur, et quasi 

 certa ; cseteris incredibilis et vana, cujus exemplar notabile est in chemicis 

 eorumque dogmatibus." 



It must be added that beside the injustice here done to Van Helmont, 

 he goes on to rank Gilbert in the same empirical class, as he elsewhere does 

 a most incorrect view of Gilbert's induction, the most perfect by far of 

 any before Lord Bacon's age, and, though mixed with some hypothetical 

 reasoning, hardly in strictness excelled by any philosopher of after times. 

 I cannot come so near the remarkable sixty-fifth section of the ' Novum 

 Organum' without digressing so far from my subject as to cite the pro- 

 phetic warning given to some zealots without knowledge of our own times 

 against the " apotheosis errorum," the " pestis intellectus, si vanis accedat 

 veneratio." " Huic autem vanitati (adds the pious and truly Christian 

 sage) nonnulli ex modernis summa levitate ita indulserunt ut in primo 

 capitulo Geneseos et in libro Job et aliis scripturae locis philosophiam 

 naturalem fundari conati stint ; inter mortua qujerentes viva ; " a folly the 

 more to be deprecated, he says, because " ex divinarum et humanarum 

 malesana admistione non solum educitur philosophia phantastica, sed etiam 

 religio hseretica." His practical conclusion, therefore, is to render unto 

 faith the things alone which are faith's : " Admodum salutare, si mente 

 sobria, fidei tantum dentur quse fidei sunt." 



C 



