436 D'ALEMBERT. 



not unconnected with this confusion is the other main 

 error of the whole treatise, the error into which Bacon 

 had fallen before; the sciences are classified under the 

 heads of memory, imagination, and reason, only Bacon's 

 arrangement revived. But nothing can be more fanciful, 

 nothing less accurate, than such a distribution, which 

 sacrifices sense to point, and sound principles of classifi- 

 cation to outward symmetry and affected simplicity. 

 The total want of precision, and of logical arrangement 

 in the details of this division, is indeed striking. Thus 

 under History we have Natural History, or a record of 

 all facts, whether relating to animals, or vegetables, or 

 minerals, or the heavenly bodies, or the elements, as 

 to heat, air, water, meteors. Then in what does this 

 differ from inductive or experimental philosophy, which 

 yet forms a branch of the second great division ? More- 

 over, why are moral facts omitted in the division of 

 History 1 ? Then the application of natural powers to 

 different uses is another branch of History, and thus all 

 the arts are introduced under this head. In the division 

 of Natural Philosophy we find equal want of precision. 

 Can anything be more inexplicable than to find a person, 

 who like D'Alembert was both a mathematician and a 

 metaphysician, treating mathematics at a branch of 

 natural science, as if number, or indeed quantity, could 

 be regarded as a physical existence ? Not more happy 

 is the execution of this plan in the moral and intellectual 

 division. These are ranged under the science of Man. 

 Then what place has the subject of instinct, which is just 

 as intellectual a branch as that of reason \ Logic is defined 

 to be the science of intellect, or the means of finding 

 truth ; Morals, that of the will, or the grounds of virtue. 



