20 



FOUNDATION AND OBJECTS 



and activity ; the parts of knowledge which thus 

 receive more distinct attention, and are propelled by 

 more undivided labour, make rapid advances; and 

 each separate undertaking justifies itself by the most 

 promising appearances and undeniable fruits. 



' This is a new stage, gentlemen, in the progress 

 of science ; a new state of things which, whilst it is 

 attended certainly with great advantages, has some 

 consequences of doubtful aspect to the highest aims 

 of philosophy. As the facts and speculations in any 

 department of knowledge are multiplied, the study 

 of it has a tendency to engross and confine the views 

 of those by whom it is cultivated ; and if the system 

 of separate societies shall encourage this institution, 

 science will be in the end retarded by them more 

 than it is at first advanced. The chief interpreters 

 of nature have always been those who grasped the 

 widest field of inquiry, who have listened with the 

 most universal curiosity to all information, and felt 

 an interest in every question which the one great 

 system of nature presents. Nothing, I think, could 

 be a more disastrous event for the sciences than that 

 one of them should be in any manner dissociated 

 from another, and nothing can conduce more to 

 prevent that dissociation than the bringing into 

 mutual contact men who have exercised great and 

 equal powers of mind upon different pursuits ; 

 nothing more fitted to shame men out of that unphilo- 

 sophical contempt which they are too apt to feel for 

 each other's objects ; nothing more likely to open to 

 them new veins of thought, which may be of the 

 utmost importance to the very inquiries on which 

 they are more peculiarly intent. . . . 



* There is a defect in these separate societies, in 

 respect to their own immediate objects, which I am 



