424 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



thought ; but, beginning with observation, it exercises the 

 reason inductively. From particulars we pass to generals, 

 from observed facts to principles, by the mental process of 

 induction, which is a powerful instrumentality. When we 

 contemplate the vast extent of the facts which form the 

 body of the various sciences, and the marvellous rapidity 

 with which they are still accumulating, the task of their ac- 

 quisition seems appalling, and utterly beyond all grasp of 

 the intellect. But there is an order of Nature by which 

 individual facts are connected and bound together, and 

 there is a corresponding capacity in the human mind of 

 seizing upon those relations, of binding the facts into 

 groups, and of dealing with them, as it were, at wholesale 

 or in masses. This is the faculty of generalization, by 

 which wide-reaching principles replace or represent the in- 

 finitude of details, which they include. Indeed, the advance 

 of science essentially consists in the successive establish- 

 ment of such general principles which rise one above an- 

 other in higher and higher stages, until a few simple laws 

 are found to explain and represent the wide range of phe- 

 nomena to which they apply. But now mark, that while in 

 this way knowledge is simplified, the mind is called into 

 higher action. The abstraction of a common law from 

 many facts, while it relieves the memory of the burden of 

 a large portion of them, makes a greater demand upon the 

 understanding. In proportion as knowledge is compressed 

 in bulk, its quality becomes, as it were, more intense ; and 

 just to the degree to which this operation is carried, is 

 greater intellectual effort required to master it. Thus, in 

 gaining command of the facts of nature and rising to a 

 comprehension of the order of the universe, we are at the 

 same time securing the highest and most salutary form of 

 mental discipline ; and a form of it, it may be added, for 

 which the traditional system of culture makes no provision. 

 The physical sciences, moreover, afford a discipline in 



I 



