454 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



thus justifying the charge of emptiness and fruitlessness 

 which is now so extensively made against metaphysical 

 studies. From Plato to Sir William Hamilton, who in- 

 scribed upon the walls of his lecture room, *' On earth there 

 is fiothitig great but ma?i; in man there is nothing great but 

 mind^'' a method has been pursued so confessedly vacant 

 of valuable results, that its partisans have actually denied 

 the attainment of truth ^to be their object: declaring that 

 the supreme aim of philosophy is nothing more than to serve 

 as a means of intellectual gymnastics.* 



In pointed contrast with this view is the method of 

 modern science. In a spirit of reverence for the order and 

 harmony of Nature where all factitious distinctions of great 

 and small disappear ; striving to dispossess herself of preju- 

 dice, and to aim only at the attainment of truth ; rejecting 

 all assumptions which can show no better warrant than that 

 they were made in the infancy of the race, she begins with 

 the simple examination of facts, and rises patiently and 

 cautiously to the knowledge of principles. The study of 

 man is entered upon in the same temper, and by the same 

 methods, that have conducted to truth in other depart- 

 ments of investigation. Finding the notion of his duality, 

 as interpreted in the past, with its resulting double series 

 of independent inquiries, to be erroneous, science proceeds 

 at the outset to reunite the dissevered fragments of hu- 

 manity, and to reconstitute the individual in thought as 

 he is in life, a concrete unit — the living, thinking, acting 

 being which we encounter in daily experience. It is now 

 established that the dependence of thought upon organic 

 conditions is so intimate and absolute, that they can no 

 longer be considered except as unity. Man, as a prob- 

 lem of study, is simply an organism of varied powers and 

 activities; and the true office of scientific inquiry is to 



* See the opening lectures of Hamilton's Metaphysics. 



