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But, Gentlemen, if our science has not been adorned in this country 

 so much as we might have wished by its monuments of wisdom, it has 

 been disfigured by its monuments of folly. There have issued from 

 the English press, within a few years, such dreams of cosmogony as 

 I believe find no parallel in the recent literature of continental Europe. 

 It would be in vain to point out to such authors the nature of our 

 data, or the method of our inductions; for they have a safer and a 

 readier road to their own conclusions. It would be in vain to tell 

 them — that the records of mankind offer no single instance of any 

 great physical truth anticipated by mere guesses and conjectures— 

 that philosophic wisdom consists in comprehending the last generali- 

 zations derived from facts each of which is only known by experiment 

 and observation ; and in advancing, by such means, to those general 

 laws by which all things are bound together. They seem not to 

 know that inventive power in physics, unlike inventive power in works 

 of art or of imagination, finds no employment in ideal creations, 

 and only means the faculty by which the mind clearly apprehends the 

 relations and analogies of things already known ; and is thereby direct- 

 ed and urged on to the discovery of new facts, by the help of new 

 comparisons — that the history of all ages (and I might add, the writ- 

 ten law of our being, where it is declared that by the sweat of our brow 

 shall we gather up our harvest) has proved this way of slow and 

 toilsome induction to be the only path which leads to physical truth. 



Laws for the government of intellectual beings, and laws by which 

 material things are held together, have not one common element to 

 connect them. And to seek for an exposition of the phsenomena of the 

 natural world among the records of the moral destinies of mankind, 

 would be as unwise, as to look for rules of moral government among 

 the laws of chemical combination. From the unnatural union of 

 things so utterly incongruous, there has from time to time sprung up 

 in this country a deformed progeny of heretical and fantastical con- 

 clusions, by which sober philosophy has been put to open shame, and 

 sometimes even the charities of life have been exposed to violation. 



No opinion can be heretical but that which is not true. Conflict- 

 ing falsehoods we can comprehend ; but truths can never war against 

 each other. I affirm, therefore, that we have nothing to fear from 

 the results of our inquiries, provided they be followed in the labo- 

 rious but secure road of honest induction. In this way we may rest 

 assured that we shall never arrive at conclusions opposed to any 

 truth, either physical or moral, from whatsoever source that truth 

 may be derived : nay rather (as in all truth there is a common es- 

 sence), that new discoveries will ever lend support and illustration 

 to things which are already known, by giving us a larger insight into 

 the universal harmonies of nature. 



Had the authors to whom I have alluded, contented themselves 

 with pointing out the errors of our logic, and the fallacies of our in- 

 duction, they might, perhaps, have done us some service. For it 

 cannot be denied that we have sometimes lost ourselves amidst the 

 strange forms of nature which have started up before us, during our 

 wanderings among the monuments of an older world : and in the 



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