THE

GENERAL NATURE AND ADVANTAGES

OF

THE STUDY

OF THE

PHYSICAL SCIENCES.

FROM A PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY OF

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY.

BY JOHN J. F. HERSCHEL, Esq. M. A.

CHAPTER I.

OF MAN, REGARDED AS A CREATURE OF INSTINCT, OF REAAND SPECULATION.-GENERAL

SON,

SCIENTIFIC PURSUITS ON THE MIND.

INFLUENCE OF

(1.) THE situation of man on the globe he inhabits, and over which he has obtained the control, is in many respects exceedingly remarkable. Compared with its other denizens, he seems, if we regard only his physical constitution, in almost every respect their inferior, and equally unprovided for the supply of his natural wants and his defence against the innumerable enemies which surround him. other animal passes so large a portion of its existence in a state of absolute helplessness, or falls, in old age, into such protracted and lamentable imbecility. To no other warmblooded animal has nature denied that indispensable covering, without which the vicissitudes of a temperate, and the

No

his

rigors of a cold climate, are equally insupportable; and to scarcely any has she been so sparing in external weapons, whether for attack or defence. Destitute alike of speed to avoid, and of arms to repel, the aggressions of his voracious foes; tenderly susceptible of atmospheric influences; and unfitted for the coarse aliments which the earth affords spontaneously during at least two thirds of the year, even in temperate climates,-man, if abandoned to mere instinct, would be of all creatures the most destitute and miserable. Distracted by terror, and goaded by famine; driven to the most abject expedients for concealment from his enemies, and to the most cowardly devices for the seizure and destruction of his nobler prey, his existence would be one continued subterfuge or stratagem; dwelling would be in dens of the earth, in clefts of rocks, or in the hollows of trees; his food worms, and the lower reptiles, or such few and crude productions of the soil as his organs could be brought to assimilate, varied with occasional relics, mangled by more powerful beasts of prey, or contemned by their more pampered choice. Remarkable only for the absence of those powers and qualities which obtain for other animals a degree of security and respect, he would be disregarded by some, and hunted down by others, till, after a few generations, his species would become altogether extinct, or, at best, would be restricted to a few islands in tropical regions, where the warmth of the climate, the paucity of enemies, and the abundance of vegetable food, might permit it to linger.

(2.) Yet man is the undisputed lord of the creation. The strongest and fiercest of his fellow-creatures,—the whale, the elephant, the eagle, and the tiger,—are slaughtered by him to supply his most capricious wants, or tamed to do him service, or imprisoned to make him sport. The spoils of all nature are in daily requisition for his most common uses, yielded with more or less readiness, or wrested with reluctance, from the mine, the forest, the ocean, and the air. Such are the first fruits of reason. Were they the only or the principal ones-were the mere acquisition of power over the materials, and the less gifted

animals, which surround us, and the consequent increase of our external comforts, and our means of preservation and sensual enjoyment, the sum of the privileges which the possession of this faculty conferred, we should, after all, have little to plume ourselves upon. But this is so far from being the case, that every one who passes his life in tolerable ease and comfort, or, rather, whose whole time is not anxiously consumed in providing the absolute necessaries of existence, is conscious of wants and cravings, in which the senses have no part, of a series of pains and pleasures totally distinct in kind from any which the infliction of bodily misery, or the gratification of bodily appetites, has ever afforded him; and if he has experienced these pleasures and these pains in any degree of intensity, he will readily admit them to hold a much higher rank, and to deserve much more attention, than the former class. Independent of the pleasures of fancy, and imagination, and social converse, man is constituted a speculative being; he contemplates the world, and the objects around him, not with a passive, indifferent gaze, as a set of phenomena in which he has no further interest than as they affect his immediate situation, and can be rendered subservient to his comfort, but as a system disposed with order and design. He approves and feels the highest admiration of the harmony of its parts, the skill and efficiency of its contrivances. Some of these, which he can best trace and understand, he attempts to imitate, and finds that, to a certain extent, though rudely and imperfectly, he can succeed, in others, that, although he can comprehend the nature of the contrivance, he is totally destitute of all means of imitation; while in others, again, and those evidently the most important, though he sees the effect produced, yet the means by which it is done are alike beyond his knowledge and his control. Thus he is led to the conception of a Power and an Intelligence superior to his own, and adequate to the production and maintenance of all that he sees in nature,—a Power and Intelligence, to which he may well apply the term infinite, since he not only sees no actual limit to the instances in which they are manifested,

but finds, on the contrary, that the farther he inquires, and the wider his sphere of observation extends, they continually open upon him in increasing abundance, and that, as the study of one prepares him to understand and appreciate another, refinement follows on refinement, wonder on wonder, till his faculties become bewildered in admiration, and his intellect falls back on itself in utter hopelessness of arriving at an end.

(3.) When, from external objects, he turns his view upon himself, on his own vital and intellectual faculties, he finds that he possesses a power of examining and analysing his own nature to a certain extent, but no farther. In his corporeal frame, he is sensible of a power to communicate a certain moderate amount of motion to himself and other objects; that this power depends on his will, and that its exertion can be suspended or increased at pleasure within certain limits; but how his will acts on his limbs, he has no consciousness; and whence he derives the power he thus exercises, there is nothing to assure him, however he may long to know. His senses, too, inform him of a multitude of particulars respecting the external world, and he perceives an apparatus by which impressions from without may be transmitted, as a sort of signals, to the interior of his person, and ultimately to his brain, wherein he is obscurely sensible that the thinking, feeling, reasoning being he calls himself, more especially resides; but by what means he becomes conscious of these impressions, and what is the nature of the immediate communication between that inward sentient being, and that machinery, his outward man, he has not the slightest conception.

(4.) Again, when he contemplates still more attentively the thoughts, acts and passions of this his sentient, intelligent self, he finds, indeed, that he can remember, and, by the aid of memory, can compare and discriminate, can judge and resolve; and, above all, that he is irresistibly impelled, from the perception of any phenomenon without or within him, to infer the existence of something prior, which stands to it in the relation of a cause, without which it would not be; and that this knowledge of causes and their

consequences is what, in almost every instance, determines his choice and will, in cases where he is nevertheless conscious of perfect freedom to act or not to act. He finds, too, that it is in his power to acquire more or less knowledge of causes and effects, according to the degree of attention he bestows upon them, which attention is again, in great measure, a voluntary act; and often, when his choice has been decided on imperfect knowledge or insufficient attention, he finds reason to correct his judgment, though perhaps too late to influence his decision by after consideration. A world within him is thus opened to his intellectual view, abounding with phenomena and relations, and of the highest immediate interest. But while he cannot help perceiving that the insight he is enabled to obtain into this internal sphere of thought and feeling, is in reality the source of all his power, the very fountain of his predominance over external nature, he yet feels himself capable of entering only very imperfectly into these recesses of his own bosom, and analysing the operations of his mind,—in this, as in all other things, in short, “a being darkly wise;" seeing that all`the longest life and most vigorous intellect can give him power to discover by his own research, or time to know by availing himself of that of others, serves only to place him on the very frontier of knowledge, and afford a distant glimpse of boundless realms beyond, where no human thought has penetrated, but which yet, he is sure, must be no less familiarly known to that Intelligence which he traces throughout creation, than the most obvious truths which he himself daily applies to his most trifling purposes. Is it wonderful that a being so constituted should first encourage a hope, and by degrees acknowledge an assurance, that his intellectual existence will not terminate with the dissolution of his corporeal frame, but rather that, in a future state of being, disencumbered of a thousand obstructions which his present situation throws in his way, endowed with acuter senses, and higher faculties, he shall drink deep at that fountain of benificent wisdom for which the slight taste obtained on earth has given him so keen a relish?

(5.) Nothing, then, can be more unfounded than the ob