PRIESTLEY. 415 



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 con- 

 fessedly in search of light, and can never tell how any 

 given fact may bear on the unknown conclusion 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 circum- 

 spection, which enables men to weigh the relative value 

 of either reasons or facts. He was cautious enough and 

 drew little from his imagination in feigning hypotheses, 

 if it be not the reasons which he invented 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 apparently 

 unlike under the same class he had not that chas- 

 tened 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 ex- 

 perimenting and of contriving the means of observation. 

 Perhaps his want of general scientific acquirements, 

 and his confined knowledge of chemistry, itself contri- 

 buted 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 prin- 

 ciple, the methodical systematic spirit which prevailed 

 over the inquiries of Black and of Cavendish the 



