GEOGRAPHY AND ASTRONOMY. 33 



nature, is similar in kind to that which historical composi- 

 tions may offer. All that belongs to the specialities of the 

 actual, to its individualities, variabilities, and accidents, 

 whether in the form and connection of natural objects and 

 phenomena, or in the struggle of man with the elements, or 

 of nations with each other, does not admit of being ration- 

 ally constructed, that is to say, of being deduced from 

 ideas alone. I venture to think that a like degree of 

 empiricism attaches to the description of the material uni- 

 verse, and to civil history ; but in reflecting on physical 

 phenomena and historical events, and in reasoning back- 

 ward to their causes, we recognise more and more the 

 grounds of that ancient belief, that the forces inherent in 

 matter, and those which regulate the moral world, exert their 

 action under the government of a primordial necessity, and 

 in recurring courses of greater or less period. It is this 

 necessity, this occult but permanent connection, this perio- 

 dical recurrence in the progressive development of forms, of 

 phenomena and of events, which constitute nature obedient 

 to the first-imparted impulse of the Creator. Physical sci- 

 ence, as the name imports, limits itself to the explanation 

 of the phsenomena of the material world by the properties 

 of matter. All beyond this belongs not to the domain of 

 the physics of the universe, but to a higher class of ideas. 

 The discovery of laws, and their progressive generalisa- 

 tion, are the objects of the experimental sciences. Kant, 

 who has never been deemed an irreligious philosopher, has 

 traced with rare sagacity the limits of physical explanations, 

 in his celebrated " Essay on the Theory and Structure of 

 the Heavens," published at Konigsberg, in 1755*. 



The study of a science which promises to lead us over the 



