Page:Conservationofen00stew.djvu/150

134 "Nor is it less an evil" (says he), "that in their philosophies and contemplations men spend their labour in investigating and treating of the first principles of tilings, and the extreme limits of nature, when all that is useful and of avail in operation is to be found in what is intermediate. Hence it happens that men continue to abstract Nature till they arrive at potential and unformed matter; and again they continue to divide Nature, until they have arrived at the atom; things which, even if true, can be of little use in helping on the fortunes of men."

Surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks of the great Father of experimental science, and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable.

186. As regards the existence of a medium, it is remarked by Whewell that the ancients also caught a glimpse of the idea of a medium, by which the qualities of bodies, as colours and sounds are perceived, and he quotes the following from Aristotle:—

Upon this the historian of science remarks, "It is easily seen that such a mode of reasoning elevates the familiar forms of language, and the intellectual connexions of terms, to a supremacy over facts."

Nevertheless, may it not be replied that our conceptions