PRELUDE. 35 



they very soon turned aside from the right road 

 to truth, and deviated into a vast field of error, 

 in which they and their successors have wandered 

 almost to the present time. It is not necessary 

 here to inquire why those faculties which appear to 

 be bestowed upon us for the discovery of truth, 

 were permitted by Providence to fail so signally in 

 answering that purpose ; whether, like the powers 

 by which we seek our happiness, they involve a 

 responsibility on our part, and may be defeated by 

 rejecting the guidance of a higher faculty ; or 

 whether these endowments, though they did not 

 immediately lead man to profound physical know- 

 ledge, answered some nobler and better purpose in 

 his constitution and government. The fact un- 

 doubtedly was, that the physical philosophy of the 

 Greeks soon became trifling and worthless; and it 

 is proper to point out, as precisely as we can, in 

 what the fundamental mistake consisted. 



To explain this, we may in the first place return 

 for a moment to Herodotus's account of the cause 

 of the floods of the Nile. 



The reader will probably have observed a re- 

 markable phrase used by Herodotus, in his own 

 explanation of these inundations. He says that the 

 sun draws, or attracts, the water; a metaphorical 

 term, obviously intended to denote some more gene- 

 ral and abstract conception than that of the visible 

 operation which the word primarily signifies. This 

 abstract notion of ' drawing' is, in the historian, as 



D2 



