98 £SSAyS IN PHILOSOPHY 



quite other than its own of docile experience and 

 patient reflexion upon experience — methods that 

 philosophy is now prepared to vindicate as higher 

 and still more trustworthy. For the primacy of mind 

 over Nature, the legislative relation of mind to the 

 world, has been found to be the real presupposition 

 of science itself, and the tacit recognition of this 

 truth to be the clue to the first sudden advance of 

 modern science, and to its unparalleled subsequent 

 progress.^ 



1 The epochal sentences of Kant, in his preface to the second edition 

 of the Critique of Pure Reason, have been more than verified by the 

 century of science and philosophy that has passed since they first savs^ 

 the day : " When Galilei made his balls roll down the inclined plane 

 with a gravitation selected by himself, or Torricelli had the air support a 

 weight which he had previously taken equal to a known column of water, 

 or Stahl later converted metals into lime, and this into metal again, by 

 withdrawing something and then putting it back, a light dawned on all 

 investigators of Nature. They comprehended that Reason only sees 

 into what she herself produces after her own design ; that with her 

 principles of judgment according to invariable laws, she must take the 

 lead, and compel Nature to answer her questions, not let herself be 

 merely taught by Nature to walk, as if in leading-strings ; for otherwise 

 she would be left to observations only casual, and these, made on no 

 plan designed beforehand, do not at all connect in a necessary law, 

 which yet is what Reason seeks and must have. With her principles 

 in one hand, solely by accord with which can agreements among phe- 

 nomena get the value of laws, and with experiment in the other, which 

 she has devised according to them. Reason must approach Nature, to 

 learn from her, indeed, but not in the quality of a pupil, who submits 

 to be prompted as the teacher pleases ; on the contrary, in the quality 

 of an invested judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to questions 

 which he puts to them himself," — The Critique of Pure Reason, edition 

 of 17S7, pp. xii, .xiii. 



