Lectures and Essays on University Subjects

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1859 Excerpt: ...that material system, with which it began, and never ventures beyond the "flammantia mcenia mundi." It may, indeed, if it chooses, feel a doubt of the completeness of its analysis hitherto, and for that reason endeavour to arrive at more simple laws and fewer principles. It maybe dissatisfied with its own combinations, hypotheses, systems; and leave Ptolemy for Newton, the alchemists for Lavoisier and Davy;--that is, it may decide that it has not yet touched the bottom of its own subject; but still its aim will be to get to the bottom, and nothing more. With matter it began, with matter it will end; it will never trespass into the province of mind. The Hindoo notion is said to be, that the earth stands upon a tortoise; but the physicist, as such, will never ask himself by what influence, external to the universe, the universe is sustained; simply because he is a physicist. If indeed he be a religious man, he will of course have a very definite view of the subject; but that view of his is private, not professional, --the view, not of a physicist, but of a religious man; and this, not because physical science says anything different, but simply because it says nothing at all on the subject, nor can do so by the very undertaking with which it set out. The question is simply extra artem. The physical philosopher has nothing whatever to do with final causes, and will get into inextricable confusion, if he introduces them into his investigations. He has to look in one definite direction, not in any other. It is said that in some countries, when a stranger asks his way, he is at once questioned in turn, what place he came from: something like this would be the unseasonableness of a physicist inquiring how the phenomena and laws of the material world prima...