Page:Collected Works of Dugald Stewart Volume 1.djvu/21

Rh executing successfully this chart or tree, a philosophical delineation of the natural progress of the mind may (according to him) furnish very useful lights; although he acknowledges that the results of the two undertakings cannot fail to differ widely in many instances the laws which regulate the generation of our ideas often interfering with that systematical order in the relative arrangement of scientific pursuits, which it is the purpose of the Encyclopedical Tree to exhibit. In treating of the first of these subjects, it cannot be denied that D'Alembert has displayed much ingenuity and invention; but the depth and solidity of his general train of thought may be questioned. On various occasions, he has evidently suffered himself to be misled by a spirit of false refinement; and on others, where probably he was fully aware of his inability to render the theoretical chain complete, he seems to have aimed at concealing from his readers the faulty links, by availing himself of those epigrammatic points, and other artifices of style, with which the genius of the French language enables a skilful writer to smooth and varnish over his most illogical transitions. The most essential imperfections, however, of this historical sketch, may be fairly ascribed to a certain vagueness and indecision in the author's idea, with regard to the scope of his inquiries. What he has in general pointed at is to trace, from the theory of the Mind, and from the order followed by nature in the development of its powers, the successive steps by which