view of the elder philosophies, which must be ranked among the most splendid proofs of his judgment no less than of his genius, and more expressly in the critique on the atomic or corpuscular doctrine of Democritus and his followers as the one extreme, and in that of the pure rationalism of Zeno the Eleatic as the other, Plato has proved incontrovertibly that in both alike the basis is too narrow to support the superstructure; that the grounds of both are false or disputable; and that, if these were conceded, yet neither the one nor the other scheme is adequate to the solution of the problem,-namely, what is the ground of the coincidence between reason and experience; or between the laws of matter and the ideas of the pure intellect. The only answer which Plato deemed the question capable of receiving, compels the reason to pass out of itself and seek the ground of this agreement in a supersensual essence, which being at once the ideal of the reason and the cause of the material world, is the pre-establisher of the harmony in and between both. Religion therefore is the ultimate aim of philosophy, in consequence of which philosophy itself becomes the supplement of the sciences, both as the convergence of all to the common end, namely wisdom; and as supplying the copula, which, modified in each in the comprehension of its parts in one whole, is in its principles common to all, as integral parts of one system. And this is method, itself a distinct science, the immediate offspring of philosophy, and the link or mordant by which philosophy becomes scientific, and the sciences philosophical. ESSAY VI. Απάντων ζητῶντες λόγον ἔξωθεν ἀναιρᾶσι λόγον. THE second relation is that of theory, in which the existing forms and qualities of objects, discovered by observation or experiment, suggest a given arrangement of many under one point of view; and this not merely or principally in order to facilitate the century, and the successive re-appearance of the different ancient sects from the restoration of literature to our own times. remembrance, recollection, or communication of the same; but for the purposes of understanding, and in most instances of controlling them. In other words, all theory supposes the general idea of cause and effect. The scientific arts of medicine, chemistry, and physiology in general, are examples of a method hitherto founded on this second sort of relation. Between these two lies the method in the fine arts, which belongs indeed to this second or external relation, because the effect and position of the parts is always more or less influenced by the knowledge and experience of their previous qualities; but which, nevertheless, constitutes a link connecting the second form of re- ! lation with the first. For in all that truly merits the name of poetry in its most comprehensive sense, there is a necessary predominance of the ideas, that is, of that which originates in the artist himself, and a comparative indifference of the materials. A true musical taste is soon dissatisfied with the harmonica or any similar instrument of glass or steel, because the body of the sound (as the Italians phrase it), or that effect which is derived from the materials, encroaches too far on the effect from the proportions of the notes, or that which is given to music by the mind. To prove the high value as well as the superior dignity of the first relation, and to evince, that on this alone a perfect method can be grounded, and that the methods attainable by the second are at best but approximations to the first, or tentative exercises in the hope of discovering it, forms the first object of the present disquisition. These truths I have (as the most pleasing and popular mode of introducing the subject) hitherto illustrated from Shakspeare. But the same truths, namely the necessity of a mental initiative to all method, as well as a careful attention to the conduct of the mind in the exercise of method itself, may be equally, and here, perhaps, more characteristically, proved from the most familiar of the sciences. We may draw our elucidation even from those which are at present fashionable among us; from botany or from chemistry. In the lowest attempt at a methodical arrangement of the former science, that of artificial classification for the preparatory purpose of nomenclature, some antecedent must have been contributed by the mind itself; some purpose must be in view; or some question at least must have been proposed to pature, grounded, as all questions are, upon some idea of the answer; as for instance, the assumption that-"two great sexes animate the world."* For no man can confidently conceive a fact to be universally true who does not with equal confidence anticipate its necessity, and who does not believe that necessity to be demonstrable by an insight into its nature, whenever and wherever such insight can be obtained. We acknowledge, we reverence, the obligations of botany to Linnæus, who, adopting from Bartholinus, Sebastian Vaillant, and others, the sexuality of plants, grounded thereon a scheme of classific and distinctive marks, by which one man's experience may be communicated to others, and the objects safely reasoned on while absent, and recognized as soon as and wherever they are met with. He invented a universal character for the language of botany chargeable with no greater imperfections than are to be found in the alphabets of every particular language. As for the study of the ancients, so for that of the works of nature, an accidence and a dictionary are the first and indispensable requisites; and to the illustrious Swede, botany is indebted for both. But neither was the central idea of vegetation itself, by the light of which we might have seen the collateral relations of the vegetable to the inorganic and to the animal world, nor the constitutive nature and inner necessity of sex itself, revealed to Linnæus. Hence, as in *Par. Lost, viii. 151.-Ed. The word nature has been used in two senses, actively and passively; energetic, or forma formans, and material, or forma formata. In the first (the sense in which the word is used in the text) it signifies the inward principle of whatever is requisite for the reality of a thing, as existent: while the essence or essential property, signifies the inner principle of all that appertains to the possibility of a thing. Hence, in accurate language, we say the essence of a mathematical circle or other geometrical figure, not the nature; because in the conception of forms purely geometrical there is no expression or implication of their real existence. In the second or material sense of the word nature, we mean by it the sum total of all things, as far as they are objects of our senses, and consequently of possible experience; the aggregate of phænomena, whether existing for our outward senses, or for our inner sense. The doctrine concerning material nature would therefore (the word physiology being both ambiguous in itself, and already otherwise appropriated) be more properly entitled phænomenology, distinguished into its two grand divisions, somatology and psychology. The doctrine concerning energetic nature is comprised in the science of dynamics; the union of which with phænomenology, and the alliance of both with the sciences of the possible, or of the conceivable, namely, logic and mathematics, constitute natural philosophy. all other cases where the master light is missing, so in this, the reflective mind avoids Scylla only to lose itself in Charybdis. If we adhere to the general notion of sex, as abstracted from the more obvious modes and forms in which the sexual relation manifests itself, we soon meet with whole classes of plants to which it is found inapplicable. If arbitrarily, we give it indefinite extension, it is dissipated into the barren truism, that all specific products suppose specific means of production. Thus a growth and a birth are distinguished by the mere verbal definition, that the latter is a whole in itself, the former not and when we would apply even this to nature, we are baffled by objects (the flower polypus, for example, and many others) in which each is the other. All that can be done by the most patient and active industry, by the widest and most continuous researches; all that the amplest survey of the vegetable realm, brought under immediate contemplation by the most stupendous collections of species and varieties, can suggest ; all that minutest dissection and exactest chemical analysis, can Having thus explained the term nature, I now more especially entreat the reader's attention to the sense in which here, and everywhere through this essay, I use the word idea. I assert, that the very impulse to universalize any phænomenon involves the prior assumption of some efficient law in nature, which in a thousand different forms is evermore one and the same, entire in each, yet comprehending all, and incapable of being abstracted or generalized from any number of phænomena, because it is itself pre-supposed in each and all as their common ground and condition, and because every definition of a genus is the adequate definition of the lowest species alone, while the efficient law must contain the ground of all in all. It is attributed, never derived. The utmost we ever venture to say is, that the falling of an apple suggested the law of gravitation to Sir I. Newton. Now a law and an idea are correlative terms, and differ only as object and subject, as being and truth. Such is the doctrine of the Novum Organum of Lord Bacon, agreeing (as I shall more largely show in the text) in all essential points with the true doctrine of Plato, the apparent differences being for the greater part occasioned by the Grecian sage having applied his principles chiefly to the investigation of the mind, and the method of evolving its powers, and the English philosopher to the development of nature. That our great countryman speaks too often detractingly of the divine philosopher must be explained, partly by the tone given to thinking minds by the Reformation, the founders and fathers of which saw in the Aristotelians, or schoolmen, the antagonists of Protestantism, and in the Italian Platonists the despisers and secret enemies of Christianity itself; and partly, by his having formed his notions of Plato's doctrine from the absurdities and phantasms of his misinterpreters, rather than from an unprejudiced study of the original works. unfold; all that varied experiment and the position of plants and of their component parts in every conceivable relation to light, heat (and whatever else we distinguish as imponderable substances), to earth, air, water, to the supposed constituents of air and water, separate and in all proportions-in short, all that chemical agents and re-agents can disclose or adduce ;-all these have been brought, as conscripts, into the field, with the completest accoutrement, in the best discipline, under the ablest commanders. Yet after all that was effected by Linnæus himself, not to mention the labors of Gesner,* Cæsalpinus,† Ray,‡ Tournefort, and the other heroes who preceded the general adoption of the sexual system, as the basis of artificial arrangement ;—after all the successive toils and enterprises of Hedwig,|| Jussieu, Mirbel, ¶ Sir James Smith, Knight, Ellis, and others,-what is botany at this present hour? Little more than an enormous nomenclature; a huge catalogue, well arranged, and yearly and monthly augmented, in various editions, each with its own scheme of technical memory and its own conveniences of reference. A dictionary in which (to carry on the metaphor) an Ainsworth arranges the contents by the initials; a Walker by the endings; a Scapula by the radicals; and a Cominius by the similarity of the uses and purposes. The terms system, method, science, are mere improprieties of courtesy, when applied to a mass enlarging by endless appositions, but without a nerve that oscillates, or a pulse that throbs, in sign of growth or inward sympathy. The innocent amusement, the healthful occupation, the ornamental accomplishment of amateurs (most honorable indeed and deserving of all praise as a preventive substitute for the stall, the kennel, and the subscription-room), it has yet to expect the devotion and energies of the philosopher. * Conrad G. who died in 1568. See his Letters.-Ed. Libri xv. De Plantis.-Ed. Methodus Plantarum nova. 1682. Historia Plantarum. 1686-7-1704. -Ed. § Elémens de Botanique; ou, Méthode pour connaître les Plantes. 1694. -Ed. Theoria generationis et fructificationis plantarum cryptogamicarum Linnæi. 1784. Cryptogamia. 1787.-Ed. Histoire générale et particulière des plantes; ou, Traité de physiologie végétale. Exposition de la théorie de l'organisation végétale. 1805. Elémens de physiologie végétale et de botanique. 1815,-Ed. |