OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 73 



ferred in matters purely physical, tend of necessity 

 to impress something of the well weighed and pro- 

 gressive character of science on the more compli- 

 cated conduct of our social and moral relations. It 

 is thus that legislation and politics become gradually 

 regarded as experimental sciences; and history, not, 

 as formerly, the mere record of tyrannies and slaugh- 

 ters, which, by immortalizing the execrable actions 

 of one age, perpetuates the ambition of committing 

 them in every succeeding one, but as the archive 

 of experiments, successful and unsuccessful, gra- 

 dually accumulating towards the solution of the 

 grand problem how the advantages of government 

 are to be secured with the least possible inconveni- 

 ence to the governed. The celebrated apophthegm, 

 that nations never profit by experience, becomes 

 yearly more and more untrue. Political economy, 

 at least, is found to have sound principles, founded 

 in the moral and physical nature of man, which, 

 however lost sight of in particular measures how- 

 ever even temporarily controverted and borne down 

 by clamour have yet a stronger and stronger testi- 

 mony borne to them in each succeeding generation, 

 by which they must, sooner or later, prevail. The 

 idea once conceived and verified, that great and 

 noble ends are to be achieved, by which the condi- 

 tion of the whole human species shall be permanently 

 bettered, by bringing into exercise a sufficient quan- 

 tity of sober thought, and by a proper adaptation of 

 means, is of itself sufficient to set us earnestly on 

 reflecting what ends are truly great and noble, either 

 in themselves, or as conducive to others of a still 

 loftier character ; because we are not now, as hereto- 



