PREFACE. V 



The concluding Book is an attempt to contribute towards the 

 solution of a question, which the decay of old opinions, and the 

 agitation that disturbs European society to its inmost depths, render 

 as important in the present day to the practical interests of human 

 life, as it must at all times be to the completeness of our speculative 

 knowledge : viz.. Whether moral and social phenomena are really 

 exceptions to the general certainty and uniformity of the course of 

 nature ; and how far the methods, by which so many of the laws 

 of the physical world have been numbered among truths irrevo- 

 cably acquired and universally assented to, can be made instru- 

 mental to the gradual formation of a similar body of received 

 doctrine in moral and political science. 



While the views promulgated in these volumes still await the 

 verdict of competent judges, it would have been useless to attempt 

 to make the exposition of them so elementary, as to be suited to 

 readers wholly unacquainted with the subject. It can scarcely be 

 hoped that the Second Book will be throughout intelligible to any 

 one who has not gone carefully through some one of the common 

 treatises on Logic ; among which that of Archbishop Whately is, 

 on every account, to be preferred. And the Third Book presup- 

 poses some degree of acquaintance with the most general truths 

 of mathematics, as well as of the principal branches of physical 

 science, and with the evidence on which those doctrines rest. 

 Among books professedly treating of the mental phenomena, a 

 previous familiarity with the earlier portion of Dr. Brown's Lec- 

 tures, or with his treatise on Cause and Effect, would, though not 

 indispensable, be advantageous ; that philosopher having, in the 

 author's judgment, taken a more correct view than any other 

 English writer on the subject of the ultimate intellectual laws of 

 scientific inquiry; while his unusual powers of popularly stating ond 

 felicitously illustrating whatever he understood, render his works 

 the best preparation which can be suggested, for speculations sim- 

 ilar to those contained in this Treatise. 



