666 PSYCHOLOGY. 



systems is one of relative sterility and failure.* Take those 

 aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being 

 most, and class the phenomena as perfect and imperfect, as 

 «nds and means to ends, as high and low, beautiful and ugly, 

 positive and negative, harmonious and discordant, fit and 

 unfit, natural and unnatural, etc., and barren are all your 

 results. In the ideal world the kind ' precious ' has char- 

 acteristic properties. What is precious should be pre- 

 served ; unworthy things should be sacrificed for its sake ; 

 exceptions made on its account ; its preciousness is a rea- 

 son for other things' actions, and the like. But none of 

 these things need happen to your ' precious ' object in the 

 real world. Call the things of nature as much as you like 

 by sentimental, moral, and aesthetic names, no natural 

 consequences follow from the naming. They may be of 

 the kinds you allege, but they are not oi ' the ki7id\s Hnd\ 

 and the last great system-maker of this sort, Hegel, was 

 obliged explicitly to repudiate logic in order to make any 

 inferences at all from the names he called things by. 



But when you give things mathematical and mechanical 

 names and call them just so many solids in just such posi-. 

 tions, describing just such paths with just such velocities, 

 all is changed. Your sagacity finds its reward in the veri- 

 fication by nature of all the deductions which you may next 

 proceed to make. Your ' things ' realize all the consequences 

 of the names by which you classed them. The modern 

 mechanico-physical philosophy of which we are all so 

 proud, because it includes the nebular cosmogony, the 

 conservation of energy, the kinetic theory of heat and 



* Yet even so late as Berkeley's time one could write : " As in reading 

 other books a wise man will choose to fix his thoughts on the sense and 

 apply it to use, rather than lay them out in grammatical remarks on the 

 language : so in perusing the volume of nature methinks it is beneath the 

 dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in reducing each particular phe- 

 nomenon to general rules, or showing how it follows from them. We 

 should propose to ourselves nobler views, namely, to i-ecreate and exalt the 

 mind with a prospect of the beauty, order, extent, and variety of natural 

 things : hence, by proper inferences, to enlarge our notions of the gran- 

 deur, wisdom, and beneficence of the Creator," etc., etc., etc. (Principles 

 of Human Knowledge, § 109.) 



