104 Proceedings of the British Association. 



but in which, when carefully examined, most essential features may 

 be recognized as identical, while some are brought out with a salience 

 and effect which could not be attained from the contrary point of 

 sight. It cannot be expected that I should enter into any analysis 

 or comparison of these remarkable works — but it seemed to me 

 impossible to avoid pointedly mentioning them on this occasion, 

 because they certainly, taken together, leave the philosophy of science, 

 and indeed the principles of all general reasoning, in a very different 

 state from that in which they found them. Their influence, indeed, 

 and that of some other works of prior date, in which the same general 

 subjects have been more lightly touched upon, has already begun to 

 be felt and responded to from a quarter where, perhaps any sympathy 

 in this respect might hardly have been looked for. The philosophi- 

 cal mind of Germany has begun, at length, effectually to awaken from 

 the dreamy trance in which it had been held for the last half-century, 

 and in which the jargon of the Absolutists and Ontologists had been 

 received as oracular. An "anti-speculative philosophy" has arisen 

 and found supporters — rejected, indeed, by the Ontologists, but 

 yearly gaining ground in the general mind. It is something so new 

 for an English and a German philosopher to agree in their estimate 

 either of the proper objects of speculation or of the proper mode of 

 pursuing them, that we greet, not without some degree of astonish- 

 ment, the appearance of works like the Logic and the New Psycholo- 

 gy of Beneke, in which this false and delusive philosophy is entirely 

 thrown aside, and appeal at once to the nature of things as we find 

 them, and to the laws of our intellectual and moral nature, as our 

 own consciousness and the history of mankind reveals them to us.* 

 Meanwhile, the fact is every year becoming more broadly manifest, 

 by the successful application of scientific principles to subjects which 

 had hitherto been only empirically treated (of which agriculture 

 may be taken as perhaps the most conspicuous instance,) that the 

 great work of Bacon was not the completion, but, as he himself 

 foresaw and foretold, only the commencement of his own philoso- 

 phy ; and that we are even yet only at the threshold of that palace of 



* Vide Beneke, Neue Psychologie, s. 300 -et seq. for an admirable view of 

 the state of metaphysical and logical philosophy in England. 



