PEIESTLEY. 79 



diligence in recording all the particulars, as if well 

 aware how much depends in every branch of inductive 

 philosophy upon allowing no fact to escape, when we 

 are confessedly in search of light, and can never tell 

 how any given fact may bear on the unknown conclu- 

 sion to which our analytical process is leading us. 

 As a reasoner his powers were far less considerable. 

 He possessed not the sound judgment, the large cir- 

 cumspection, which enables men to weigh the relative 

 value of either reasons or facts. He was cautious 

 enough, and drew little from his imagination in feign- 

 ing hypotheses, if it be not the reasons which he in- 

 vented from time to time for the purpose of sustaining 

 the desperate fortunes of the phlogistic theory, and 

 making the facts bend to it as they successively arose, 

 with a force capable of shivering it in pieces. But he 

 was also deficient in the happy sagacity which pierces 

 through apparent dissimilarity, and ranges things 

 seemingly unlike under the same class he had not 

 that chastened imagination which can see beyond the 

 fact present to the senses in a word, he was much 

 greater as a collector of new facts than a reasoner upon 

 them and his inductive capacity was inferior to his 

 power of experimenting and of contriving the means 

 of observation. Perhaps his want of general scientific 

 acquirements, and his confined knowledge of chemis- 

 try, itself contributed to the activity and the boldness 

 with which he performed novel experiments, while the 

 same defect impaired his capacity as an inductive 

 philosopher. It is extremely probable that the strict 

 attention to principle, the methodical systematic spirit 

 which presided over the inquiries of Black and of 

 Cavendish the scientific views which directed the 

 contrivance of all their processes, never leading them 

 to make any trial without some definite object in view, 

 prevented them from performing many experiments, 

 from stooping, as it were, to try things which 

 Priestley did not disdain to try from his more empiri- 



