CONTINUITY OF VITAL PROCESSES 43 



failure, he asks again and again for his father's 

 steeds. It has been said that this so-called 

 philosophy of Nature has never achieved anything ; 

 that it has done nothing but prove that things must 

 be exactly as they had been found to be by the 

 observer and collector. Physical science, however, 

 would never have been what it is without the 

 impulses which it received from the philosopher, 

 nay, even from the poet. 'At the limits of exact 

 knowledge,' said Humbolt, 'as from a lofty island- 

 shore, the eye loves to glance towards distant 

 regions. The images which it sees may be illusive ; 

 but like the illusive images which people imagined 

 they had seen from the Canaries or the Azores long 

 before the time of Columbus, they may lead to the 

 discovery of a new world.' 



" Copernicus, in his dedication of his work to Pope 

 Paul III. (it was commenced in 1517, finished in 1530, 

 and published in 1543), confesses that he was brought 

 to the discovery of the sun's central position, and of 

 the diurnal motion of the fearth, not by observation 

 or analysis, but by what he calls the feeling of a 

 want of symmetry in the Ptolemaic system. 



" Truth is not found by addition and multiplication 

 only. When speaking of Kepler, whose method of 

 reasoning has been considered as unsafe and fan- 

 tastic by his contemporaries as well as by later 

 astronomers. Sir David Brewster remarks very truly 

 'that as an instrument of research, the influence of 

 imagination has been much overlooked by those who 

 have ventured to give laws to philosophy. 



