Page:Collected Works of Dugald Stewart Volume 1.djvu/28

10 classification, may be derived from the very imperfect and partial analysis of the mind which it assumes as its basis. Why were the powers of Abstraction and Generalization passed over in silence?—powers which, according as they are cultivated or neglected, constitute the most essential of all distinctions between the intellectual characters of individuals. A corresponding distinction, too, not less important, may be remarked among the objects of human study, according as our aim is to treasure up particular facts, or to establish general conclusions. Does not this distinction mark out, with greater precision, the limits which separate philosophy from mere historical narrative, than that which turns upon the different provinces of Reason and of Memory?

I shall only add one other criticism on this celebrated enumeration, and that is, its want of distinctness, in confounding together the Sciences and the Arts under the same general titles. Hence a variety of those capricious arrangements, which must immediately strike every reader who follows Bacon through his details; the reference, for instance, of the mechanical arts to the department of History; and, consequently, according to his own analysis of the mind, the ultimate reference of these arts to the faculty of Memory: while, at the same time, in his tripartite division of the whole field of human knowledge, the art of Poetry has one entire province allotted to itself. These objections apply in common to Bacon and to D'Alembert. That which follows has a particular reference to a passage already cited from the latter, where, by some false refinements concerning the nature and functions of Imagination, he has rendered the classification of his predecessor incomparably more indistinct and illogical than it seemed to be before.

That all the creations, or new combinations of Imagination, imply the previous process of decomposition or analysis, is abundantly manifest; and, therefore, without departing from the common and popular use of language, it may undoubtedly be said, that the faculty of abstraction is not less essential to the Poet, than to the Geometer and the