314 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
with results which, if not perfect, are yet such as cannot but intensify- 
further exertion. They believe that even now they have a large 
reward in being permitted to see, as was never so clearly seen before, 
that all things material, though complicate and diverse, are in a 
peculiar sense one ; that order the most beautiful and uniform is 
everywhere present ; that physical antecedent and consequent are 
the everlasting and inseparable twins that people the universe in 
every point of space ; that the irregularities of sense are the regu- 
larities of Science ; and that the stupendous systems rolling through 
space above, and the intricate and varied forms hidden in the earth 
and spread over its surface, are probably the orderly outcome of a 
primitive simplicity, so framed at the outset as to exchange in due 
time its small beginnings and humble functions for the ineffable 
splendour on which we now gaze. 
But while such is to be regarded as the true Scientific Spirit, 
legitimately generated by the application to physical research of the 
new method, or, perhaps more correctly, exhibiting itself in the 
progressive application of that method, it is not identical with a 
spirit which obtains wide prevalence in some quarters, and which 
claims to be scientific. We must not forget that it is human 
nature that is the home of the Scientific Spirit, and human nature 
is more comprehensive than the intellect, and too often leaves the 
impress of its non-intellectual upon the intellectual powers. In all 
departments of life we are familiar with the peculiar dangers 
attendant on prosperity. Great successes are wont to create new 
ambitions, and so bring into play a powerful class of feelings as 
distinguished from intellectual perceptions; and therefore, con- 
sidering what had been already achieved, and the splendour of the 
view obtained of the correlation of all things distinctively physical, 
it is not perhaps surprising that, under the impulse of the emotional 
side of human nature, the idea should be engendered as to the 
possibility of an organon of research that had accomplished so 
much being still farther used in another direction, till even the 
thought and the will, which in combination construct Science, should 
also be brought within the solving power of the same method, and 
so be at last comprehended with the physical in a common unity. 
In the time of Newton, and still later, the rigid application of the 
scientific method to distinctively physical objects proceeded on the 
open recognition of a sphere of phenomena and reality to which its 
tests were not appropriate. There was an admission of the existence 
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