208 MATHEMATICAL MODES OF 



Although biology had hitherto made great, decided, and 

 certain advances by the superficial method of inquiry, che- 

 mical and mechanical philosophy had gone far beyond it. 

 Motions, forms, and weights are now subjected to geometrical 

 analysis, and treated in the abstract, a result which had not 

 yet been attained in anatomical and physiological science, 

 but which in time would be so. 



Without trenching upon the important considerations con- 

 nected with soul or spirit, or inquiring into the nature of the 

 spiritual organs, if any, of the animal or vegetable philoso- 

 phical questions, with which physiology and anatomy had 

 nothing to do, yet questions which should not be allowed to 

 lie uncultivated an acquaintance with the principles of phi- 

 losophy in their applications to the physiological sciences 

 ought to be gained. These constituted a set of sciences based 

 upon altogether different principles : 1st, on the internal 

 analysis of their own feelings, their own minds, and the prin- 

 ciples originally implanted within them, by consideration of 

 which, sound moral and intellectual conclusions were arrived 

 at ; and, 2d, an inquiry into the mental phenomena, or what- 

 ever they might choose to call them, presented by the lower 

 animals. This they might perform either by reasoning from 

 their own intellects downwards, just as they reasoned in 

 regard to their fellowmen, only passing down the scale ; or 

 they might compare the mental phenomena of the lower with 

 those of the higher animals thus building up a comparative 

 psychological science which would become simplified as they 

 passed down the series, and complex as they passed upwards. 

 The study by the anatomist and the physiologist, and by every 

 medical man, as far as the bent of his own mind admitted, of 

 these results of psychological science, was most important. 



Anatomy had been hitherto advanced by the study of the 

 animal form and of the exact harmony under which only the 

 animal could exist. But there was another view that might 



