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CHAPTER III. 



THAT THERE IS, OR MAY BE, A SCIENCE OF 

 HUMAN NATURE, 



$ ] . IT is a common notion, or at least it is implied 

 in many common modes of speech, that the thoughts, 

 feelings, and actions of sentient beings are not a sub- 

 ject of science, in the same strict sense in which this 

 is true of the objects of outward Nature. This notion 

 seems to involve some confusion of ideas, which it is 

 necessary to begin by clearing up. 



Any facts are fitted, in themselves, to be a subject 

 of science, which follow one another according to 

 constant laws ; although those laws may not have been 

 discovered, nor even be discoverable by our existing 

 resources. Take, for instance, the most familiar 

 class of meteorological phenomena, those of rain and 

 sunshine. Scientific inquiry has not yet succeeded in 

 ascertaining the order of antecedence and consequence 

 among these 'phenomena, so as to be able, at least in our 

 regions of the earth, to predict them with certainty, or 

 even with any high degree of probability. Yet no one 

 doubts that the phenomena depend upon laws, and that 

 these must be derivative laws resulting from known ulti- 

 mate laws, those of heat, vaporization, and elastic fluids. 

 Nor can it be doubted that if we were acquainted with 

 all the antecedent circumstances, we could, even from 

 those more general laws, predict (saving difficulties of 

 calculation) the state^ of the weather at any future 

 time. Meteorology, therefore, not only has in itself 

 every natural requisite for being, but actually is, a 

 science; although, from the difficulty of observing 

 the facts upon which the phenomena depend (a diffi- 



