Page:Collected Works of Dugald Stewart Volume 1.djvu/22

4 the curiosity may be conceived to have been gradually conducted from one intellectual pursuit to another; but, in the execution of this design, (which in itself is highly philosophical and interesting,) he does not appear to have paid due attention to the essential difference between the history of the human species, and that of the civilized and inquisitive individual. The former was undoubtedly that which principally figured in his conceptions; and to which, I apprehend, he ought to have confined himself exclusively; whereas, in fact, he has so completely blended the two subjects together, that it is often impossible to say which of them was uppermost in his thoughts. The consequence is, that instead of throwing upon either those strong and steady lights which might have been expected from his powers, he has involved both in additional obscurity. This indistinctness is more peculiarly remarkable in the beginning of his Discourse, where he represents men in the earliest infancy of science, before they had time to take any precautions for securing the means of their subsistence, or of their safety,—as philosophizing on their sensations,—on the existence of their own bodies,—and on that of the material world. His Discourse, accordingly, sets out with a series of Meditations, precisely analogous to those which form the introduction to the philosophy of Descartes; meditations which, in the order of time, have been uniformly posterior to the study of external nature; and which, even in such an age as the present, are confined to a comparatively small number of recluse metaphysicians.

Of this sort of conjectural or theoretical history, the most unexceptionable specimens which have yet appeared, are indisputably the fragments in Mr. Smith's posthumous work on the History of Astronomy, and on that of the Ancient Systems of Physics and Metaphysics. That, in the latter of these, he may have occasionally accommodated his details to his own peculiar opinions concerning the object of Philosophy, may perhaps, with some truth, be alleged; but he must at least be allowed the merit of completely avoiding the error by which D'Alembert was misled; and even in those instances where he himself seems