merable others, are the exponents. The process by which it tracks and verifies the law through wide and various ramifications is that of induction; according to which, observed facts are so connected as to yield new truths; and these truths, regarded in their turn as facts, are so associated as to produce yet higher truths; and so onwards through a succession of higher and wider generalizations. And the province of inductive Logic is to test the truth inferred in this manner from facts, and thus silently and indirectly to discipline the mind in its spontaneous movements after knowledge. To this subject we shall advert again when we come to speak of the Deductive method.

13. Art.- The objects of nature in all their endless beauty, and variety, and elaborate perfection, are works of Divine art; for they were all conceived in the infinite mind of the Maker, and embody and express the laws of the Divine Intelligence. In works of human art, the procedure of the Infinite Artist and Mechanist is feebly copied. Taking a product of the Divine Hand, and which is susceptible of other forms and applications than that which is already given to it, the human artist aspires to impress it with one of these new characters. But "the prophetic eye of art" is "the mind's eye;" the forecasting conception of the mind, aiming to express itself outwardly according to its own laws of proportion, congruity, harmony, and grace, but in obedience to the pre-existing laws of the material objects and laws with which it works.

14. Here, then, is a second means of knowledge. The last section gave us objects, but unconnected; this has given us their mutual relations. By perception, the impressions of sense are given as facts; the understanding gives the relations of these facts, disclosed by reflection, as science. The laws of causation, successiveness, and resemblance, are found, in operation, alike in the world within and the world without. The relations of the subjective answer to those of the objective, and to each other; so that all the objects and the ideas which come under these relations are found to be capable of suggesting one another. But if such be the correspondence of the mind to objective nature, how subtle, complicated, and immense must be the web of its associations! Consequently, how vast and varied the means of knowledge thus brought within its reach! Having looked abroad over creation, man can then look within and scan the wondrous instrument - his own mind-by which he has done it can place its past operations and their results

before him objectively, and view them as if they formed merely an additional phenomenon in the aggregate of things existing in the world without. As the visible objects of creation are facts expressing for his observation Divine thoughts, so his own thoughts are additional facts submitted to his notice for the same end.

15. The pre-existing relations of the material system into which man has been introduced, were arranged with a prospective regard to the mind which is to trace them. They are made for the man, and not the man for them. He is their proximate or medial end. So that while it may be proper to say that, chronologically, the objective determines what the subjective shall be, it is right to say that, logically, nature was preconfigured to the destined constitution of the human mind. According to Kant, indeed, the qualities we attribute to outward objects are really derived from our own minds, so that the science of logic must exactly correspond with the science of physics, or rather, they would be identical. But the truth is, so nicely are the objective and the subjective adjusted, that they expound each other. A lofty intelligence, on surveying the creation before man was made, might have foretold what the characteristics of his mental and bodily constitution would be; or the same intelligence, had it been possible for him to meet with man in some distant tract of the universe, and without previously knowing anything of the planet for which he was destined, might have accurately conceived its all-related constitution. So exquisite is the adjustment of which we speak, that, were it to be deranged in a single principal relation, there is ground to conclude, that not only might it make all future progress in knowledge impossible, but perplex and render unavailing all that we now possess; but that, as long as it remains undisturbed, every new and well-directed effort of the mind ensures some new discovery of truth, and every such discovery imparts additional power for making further progress still.

SECT. III. Reason, Speculative and Realized, or Ideal and Applied.*

1. If in addition to the sensible phenomena of external nature, and to their objective relations, there be corresponding

*The distinction of the division I have adopted-of sensational perception, reflective understanding, and rational beliefs — from that of Kant's

objects infinitely greater-corresponding, that is, as time to eternity, or as the finite to the infinite-and if the idea or belief of their existence would tend to exalt our conceptions of God more even than all the material, and the relations of the material indirectly ascertained, then man may be expected either to have this idea or a native susceptibility to have it awakened in his mind.

2. We have seen that the mind is sensibly related to every external object, and that if external objects are related by common laws, so also the mind has corresponding laws of intelligence. But we have seen also that all these objective relations point to other and higher objects; they awaken ideas of certain principles or truths metaphysically necessary in order to account for their existence. While speaking of the laws of the understanding, we were constantly and unavoidably presupposing - these principles. What are these ultimate truths or beliefs? In order to illustrate their nature, we may refer to the following. We have found that no object can be conceived of without the accompanying idea of space-no succession can be imagined without the accompanying idea of duration—no mental operation be recalled without involving the idea of time in which the act is performed. Every change necessarily presupposes a cause, and involves the principle of causality of which the change is a particular manifestation; and every quality or phenomenon involves the conviction of a substratum in which it inheres, a substance of which the quality is a manifestation. Here are four objects of thought-body, succession, change, quality; and here are the four conditions of these objects respectively -space, time, cause, and subject. The former may vary; we can conceive of any particular instances of them as even non-existent; but the non-existence of the latter is inconceivable. Their existence, then, is antecedent to the existence of all sensible phenomena; all phenomena presuppose them, and without them could not exist. Then they exist independently of all phenomena: our ideas of them are not the realities themselves, neither do we create the ideas in the act of knowing them. And without limitation; for even to think away the limited and the finite, is to leave the unlimited and the infinite; the former presupposes the latter, and is logically present in one and the same act of thought. Then, further,

sense, understanding, and reason, if not apparent already, will become sufficiently clear as we advance.

the ideas of them must have existed in the Divine Mind antecedent to the means employed for their manifestation, and in order to it; and the mind of man must have been pre-constituted for the development of the same ideas, otherwise these means would be undecipherable. In the Mind of the Infinite Creator, indeed, the ideas preceded the production of the phenomena or laws by which they are indicated; for the law is the idea made objective; hence, Lord Bacon "describes the laws of the material universe as ideas in nature. Quod in natura naturata Lex, in natura naturante Idea dicitur." In the mind of man, on the contrary, the laws or phenomena take precedence, in the order of succession, of the ideas; for as the ideas existed out of the relation of time, and independently of it, it was not until the phenomena were given that the conditions were supplied to man, a being of sense and time, by which he could become conscious of or apprehend the ideas. But the ideas themselves, once apprehended, are as distinct from the phenomena for the human mind, according to its nature, as they are for the Mind of the Divine Original. To a party speaking, the thought is first; to the party listening, the speech; for each, the thought is equally distinct from the speech, and, it may be, though hardly half-uttered, it is clearly apprehended. In a similar manner, the ideas of the Divine Mind uttered, or rather hinted, in the laws of nature, are seized and responded to by a mind made in its own image, and having them implied in its very constitution.

3. Now, ideas such as those referred to, (and of which we shall have to notice some not susceptible of expression in material phenomena,) are to be regarded as characteristic of the reason, the highest intellectual prerogative of man. (a) That they are not the creatures of experience is evident, for they are characterized by universality, whereas experience can testify only to particular cases; they are characterized by necessity, whereas experience can know nothing of what will be or of what must be. But may not these ideas be the ultimate expressions of that generalizing faculty which collects all the individual results of experience, and forms them into a whole? Still such generalizations can only give us experimental truths, and truths therefore destitute of the properties of universality and necessity which distinguish the ideas or beliefs of the reaNeither can the imagination be supposed to originate them, for this faculty has to do, not with the necessary, but with the possible. Nor can any strength of mere association

son.

account for their felt necessity; for while the dissociation of certain things which we have never seen otherwise than together, would not greatly surprise us, the severance or contradiction of other things which we have never seen illustrated, it may be, more than once, is utterly inconceivable. And the only satisfactory explanation of the difference is, that while the former would only contradict our experience, the latter would offer violence to our reason. The one is merely the correction of an inference; the other, an assault on our mental constitution.

4. (b) Accordingly, there are some truths which exist in and for the mind alone. The pure mathematical sciences consist of the evolved relations of some of these truths. Their only principles are definitions and axioms; their only method of proof that of deduction. So truly are they fundamental, that the progress of the principal inductive sciences_depends on their cultivation. Their truths are the last authority of all judgments on the subjects to which they relate. They are pure, as being incapable of perfect realization in material bodies. External nature knows nothing of mere abstract truth. All its objects are concrete; the abstract is only given in them. But though the truths in question have never been, never can be, objectively realized, their subjective reality possesses all the certainty of our intuitive consciousness. No exception can limit their universality. No conceivable relation or power can affect their necessity.

5. (c) A prior idea or purpose exists in the mind, and is necessary for it, in every inquiry after truth. Every experiment is a question, and every question is founded on some idea of the answer. In every such effort, the mind is deductive before it is inductive; synthetic before it is analytic. How, inquires Plato, can you expect to find, unless you have a general notion of what you seek? Equally does Bacon himself teach that the mind must bring to every experiment a precogitation, or antecedent idea, as the ground of that prudens quæstio, or fore-casting query, which he pronounces to be the prior half of the knowledge sought. "This conception," says Jouffroy, "is the fundamental axiom in all the sciences of facts, the torch which guides their researches, and the soul which animates their method." To supply such conceptions the mind is impelled by the idea that all phenomena have causes and laws, and that by assigning these the phenomena will be accounted for. And as the reason contains in itself the conditions of all