VICIOUS EMPIRICISM. 19 



feeble sentimentality of character; I mean the fear that 

 nature may lose part of her charms, and part of the magic of 

 her power over our minds, when we begin to penetrate her 

 secrets, to comprehend the mechanism of the movements 

 of the heavenly bodies, and to estimate numerically the in- 

 tensity of forces. It is true that, properly speaking, the 

 forces of nature can only exert over us a magical power, by 

 their action being to our minds enveloped in obscurity, and 

 beyond the conditions of our experience. Even supposing 

 that they would thus be the better fitted to excite our ima- 

 gination, that assuredly is not the faculty which we should 

 prefer to evoke, whilst engaged in those laborious subsidiary 

 observations, which have for their ultimate object the know- 

 ledge of the grandest and most admirable laws of the uni- 

 verse. The astronomer occupied in determining, by the aid 

 of the heliometer, or of the doubly refracting prism ( 10 ), the 

 diameter of planetary bodies ; or patiently engaged for years 

 in measuring the meridian altitudes of certain stars and 

 their distances apart, or, searching for a telescopic comet 

 among a crowded group of nebulse, does not feel his ima- 

 gination more excited, (and this is the very warrant of the 

 accuracy of his work,) than the botanist who is intent on 

 counting the divisions of the calix, the number of sta- 

 mens, or the sometimes connected, and sometimes indepen- 

 dent, teeth of the capsule of a moss. And yet it is these 

 precise angular measurements, and minute organic relations, 

 which prepare and open the way to the higher knowledge of 

 nature and of the laws of the universe. The physical phi- 

 losopher (as Thomas Young, Arago, and Eresnel,) measures 

 with admirable sagacity the waves of light of unequal length, 

 which by their interferences reinforce or destroy each other, 

 even in respect to their chemical action : the astronomer 



