INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 15 



superinducing this yellowness, gravity, ductility, fixedness, 

 faculty of fusion, solution, &c., with their particular degrees 

 and proportions, will consider how to join them together in 

 some body, so that a transmutation into gold shall follow.' 



On the other hand, the analytic method, or, ' the enquiry 

 from what origin gold or any other metal or stone is generated 

 from its first fluid matter or rudiments, up to a perfect min- 

 eral/ is to be perceived by what Bacon calls the latent pro- 

 cess, or a search for ' what in every generation or transfor- 

 mation of bodies, flies off, what remains behind, what is add- 

 ed, what separated, &c. ; also, in other alterations and mo- 

 tions, what gives motion, what governs it, and the like/ 

 Bacon appears to have thought that qualities separate from 

 the substances themselves were attainable, and if not capable 

 of physical isolation, were at all events capable of physical 

 transference and superinduction. 



Subsequently to Bacon a belief has generally existed, and 

 now to a great extent exists", in what are called secondary 

 causes, or consequential steps, wherein one phenomenon is 

 supposed necessarily to hang on another, until at last we ar- 

 rive at an essential cause, subject immediately to the First 

 Cause. This notion is generally prevalent both on the Con- 

 tinent and in this country : nothing is more familiar than the 

 expression ' study the effects in order to arrive at the causes.' 



Instead of regarding the proper object of physical science 

 as a search after essential causes, I believe it ought to be, and 

 must be, a search after facts and relations that although the 

 word Cause may be used in a secondary and concrete sense, 

 as meaning antecedent forces, yet in an abstract sense it is to- 

 tally inapplicable ; we cannot predicate of any physical agency 

 that it is abstractedly the cause of another ; and if, for the sake 

 of convenience, the language of secondary causation be per- 

 missible, it should be only with reference to the special phe- 

 nomena referred to, as it can never be generalised. 



The misuse, or rather varied use, of the term Cause, has 



