. ADDRESS. Ixxi 



losojMa prima of Bacon. There is a great deal of what I cannot but 

 regard as fallacious and misleading Philosophy — "oppositions of Science falsely 

 so called " — abroad in the world at the present time. And I hope to satisfy 

 you, that those who sot up their oivn conceptions of the Orderly Sequence 

 which they discern in the Phenomena of Nature, as fixed and determinate 

 Laius, by which those phenomena not only are within all Human expe- 

 rience, but always have been, and always must he, invariably governed, are 

 really guilty of the Intellectual arrogance they condemn in the Systems of 

 the Ancients, and place themselves in diametrical antagonism to those real 

 Philosophers, by whose comprehensive grasp and penetrating insight that 

 Order has been so far disclosed. For what love of the Truth as it is in 

 Nature was ever more conspicuous, than that which Kepler displayed, in his 

 abandonment of each of the ingenious conceptions of the Planetary System 

 which his fertile Imagination bad successively devised, so soon as it proved 

 to be inconsistent with the facts disclosed by observation ? In that almost 

 admiring description of the way in which his enemy Mars, " whom he had 

 left at home a despised Captive," had " burst aU the chains of the equations, 

 and broke forth from the prisons of the tables," who does not recognize the 

 justice of Schiller's definition of the real Philosopher, as one who always 

 loves Truth better than his System ? And when at last he had gained the 

 full assurance of a success so complete that (as be says) he thought bo must 

 be dreaming, or that he had been reasoning in a circle, who does not feel the 

 almost sublimity of the self-abnegation, with which, after attaining what 

 was in his own estimation such a glorious reward of his Hfe of toil, dis- 

 appointment, and self-sacrifice, be abstains from claiming the applause of 

 his contemporaries, but leaves his fame to after ages in these noble words : 

 " The book is written ; to be read, either now or by posterity, I care not 

 " which. It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six 

 " thousand years for an observer." 



And when a yet greater than Kepler was bringing to its final issue 

 that grandest of all Scientific Conceptions, long pondered over by his 

 almost superhuman intellect, — which linked together the Heavens and the 

 Earth, the Planets and the Sun, the Primaries and their Satellites, and 

 included even the vagrant Comets, in the nexus of a Universal Attraction — 

 establishing for all time the truth for whose iitterance GaHleo had been con- 

 demned, and giving to Kepler's Laws a significance of which their author had 

 never dreamed, — what was the meaning of that agitation which prevented the 

 Philosopher from completing his computation, and compelled him to band it 

 over to his friend ? That it was not the thought of his own greatness, but 

 the glimpse of the grand Universal Order thus revealed to his mental 

 vision, which shook the serene and massive soul of Newton to its founda- 

 tions, we have the proof in that beautiful comparison in which he likened 

 himself to a Child picking up shells on the shore of the vast Ocean of Truth ; 

 a comparison which will be evidence to all time at once of his true Phi- 

 losophy and of his profound Humility. 



Though it is with the Intellectual Eepresentation of Nature which we call 

 Science,th.dAwe are primarily concerned, it will not be without its use to cast 

 a glance in the first instance at the other two principal charactei's under 

 which Man acts as her Interpreter,— those, namely, of the Artist and of the 

 Poet. 



The Artist serves as the Interpreter of Nature, not when he works as the 

 mere copyist, delineating that which he sees with his bodily eyes, and which 

 we could see as well for ourselves ; but when he endeavours to awaken within 



