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 jection which has been taken in limine, by persons, well meaning perhaps, certainly narrow-minded, against the study of natural philosophy, and, indeed, against all science,that it fosters in its cultivators an undue and overweening self-conceit, leads them to doubt the immortality of the soul, and to scoff at revealed religion. Its natural effect, we may confidently assert, on every well-constituted mind, is and must be the direct contrary. No doubt, the testimony of natural reason, on whatever exercised, must of necessity stop short of those truths which it is the object of revelation to make known; but, while it places the existence and principal attributes of a Deity on such grounds as to render doubt absurd and atheism ridiculous, it unquestionably opposes no natural or necessary obstacle to further progress on the contrary, by cherishing as a vital principle an unbounded spirit of inquiry, and ardency of expectation, it unfetters the mind from prejudices of every kind, and leaves it open and free to every impression of a higher nature, which it is susceptible of receiving, guarding only against enthusiasm and self-deception by a habit of strict investigation, but encouraging, rather than suppressing, every thing that can offer a prospect or a hope beyond the present obscure and unsatisfactory state. The character of the true philosopher is to hope all things not impossible, and to believe all things not unreasonable. He who has seen obscurities which appeared impenetrable, in physical and mathematical science, suddenly dispelled, and the most barren and unpromising fields of inquiry converted, as if by inspiration, into rich and inexhaustible springs of knowledge and power, on a simple change of our point of view, or by merely bringing to bear on them some principle which it never occurred before to try, will surely be the very last to acquiesce in any dispiriting prospects of either the present or future destinies of mankind; while, on the other hand, the boundless views of intellectual and moral, as well as material relations, which open on him on all hands, in the course of these pursuits, the knowledge of the trivial place he occupies in the scale of creation, and the sense, continually pressed upon him, of his own weakness and incapacity to suspend or modify the slightest movement of the vast machinery he sees in action around him, must effectually convince him that humility of pretension, no less than confidence of hope, is what best becomes his character. : (6.) But while we thus vindicate the study of natural philosophy from a charge at one time formidable from the pertinacity and acrimony with which it was urged, and still occasionally brought forward to the distress and disgust of every well constituted mind, we must take care that the testimony afforded by science to religion, be its extent or value what it may, shall be at least independent, unbiassed, and spontaneous. We do not here allude to such reasoners as would make all nature bend to their narrow interpretations of obscure and difficult passages in the sacred writings such a course might well become the persecutors of Galileo and the other bigots of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but can only be adopted by dreamers in the present age. But, without going these lengths, it is no uncommon thing to find persons earnestly attached to science, and anxious for its promotion, who yet manifest a morbid sensibility on points of this kind,-who exult and applaud when any fact starts up explanatory (as they suppose) of some scriptural allusion, and who feel pained and disappointed when the general course of discovery in any department of science runs wide of the notions with which particular passages in the Bible may have impressed themselves. To persons of such a frame of mind it ought to suffice to remark, on the one hand, that truth can never be opposed to truth, and, on the other, that error is only to be effectually confounded by searching deep and tracing it to its source. Nevertheless, it were much to be wished that such persons, estimable and excellent as they for the most part are, before they throw the weight of their applause or discredit into the scale of scientific opinion on such grounds, would reflect, first, that the credit and respectability of any evidence may be destroyed by tampering with its honesty; and, secondly, that this very disposition of mind implies a lurking mistrust in its own principles, since the grand, and, indeed, only character of truth, is its capability of enduring the test of universal experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discussion. (7.) But if science may be vilified by representing it as opposed to religion, or trammelled by mistaken notions of the danger of free inquiry, there is yet another mode by which it may be degraded from its native dignity; and that is, by placing it in the light of a mere appendage to, and caterer for, our pampered appetites. The question “cui bono," to what practical end and advantage do your researches tend? is one which the speculative philosopher, who loves knowledge for its own sake, and enjoys, as a rational being should enjoy, the mere contemplation of harmonious and mutually dependent truths, can seldom hear without a sense of humiliation. He feels that there is a lofty and disinterested pleasure in his speculations, which ought to exempt them from such questioning. Communicating, as they do, to his own mind the purest happiness (after the exercise of the benevolent and moral feelings) of which human nature is susceptible, and tending to the injury of no one, he might surely allege this as a sufficient and direct reply to those who, having themselves little capacity, and less relish, for intellectual pursuits, are constantly repeating upon him this inquiry. But if he can bring himself to descend from this high but fair ground, and justify himself, his pursuits, and his pleasures, in the eyes of those around him, he has only to point to the history of all science, where speculations apparently the most unprofitable have almost invariably been those from which the greatest practical applications have emanated. What, for instance, could be apparently more unprofitable than the dry speculations of the ancient geometers on the properties of the conic sections, or than the dreams of Kepler (as they would naturally appear to his contemporaries) about the numerical harmonies of the universe? Yet these are the steps by which we have risen to a knowledge of the elliptic motions of the planets, and the law of gravitation, with all its splendid theoretical consequences, and its inestimable practical results. The ridicule attached to |