8 SPECIAL RESULTS OF OBSERVATION Iff THE DOMAIN 



domain of human thought and feeling. In this part of my 

 undertaking I have more particularly contented myself with 

 dwelling on the subjects which lay most in the direction of 

 my previously long-cherished studies : on the manifestations 

 of the more or less vivid feeling of nature in classical 

 antiquity, and in modern times; on the fragments of 

 poetic description of nature, whose tone of colouring has 

 been so materially influenced by individuality of national 

 character, and by the religious monotheistic view of crea- 

 tion ; on the pleasing magic of landscape painting ; and 

 on the history of the physical contemplation of the Uni- 

 verse ; i. e. the history of the gradual development, in the 

 course of two thousand years, of the recognition of the 

 unity of phsenomena, and of the Universe as a Whole. 



In a work so comprehensive, and at once scientific and 

 literary in its aim, all that a first and imperfect attempt can 

 aspire to accomplish is, to influence rather by what it may call 

 forth than by what it can itself supply. A book of Nature, 

 which may be worthy of so exalted a title, can only be looked 

 for when the natural sciences, notwithstanding their inherent 

 incapability of absolute completion, shall yet, by continued 

 progress and extension, have reached a higher standing 

 point ; and when thus a new and clearer light shall have 

 been thrown alike on the two spheres of the one Cosmos, 

 the external world perceived by the senses, and its internal 

 reflection in the mind. 



I think I have sufficiently indicated the reasons which 

 have determined me not to give to the general picture of 

 Nature a wider extension. It remains for the third and 

 last volume of my work to supply some of the deficiencies 

 of the earlier ones, and to put forward those results of 



