Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/139

Rh culative students. Neither of them can be said to have enriched the stock of human knowledge by the addition of any one important general conclusion; but the maxims of both have operated very extensively and powerfully on the taste and principles of the higher orders all over Europe, and predisposed them to give a welcome reception to the same ideas, when afterwards reproduced with the imposing appendages of logical method, and of a technical phraseology. The foregoing reflections, therefore, are not so foreign as might at first be apprehended, to the subsequent history of ethical and of metaphysical speculation. It is time, however, now to turn our attention to a subject far more intimately connected with the general progress of human reason,—the philosophy of Descartes.

According to a late writer, whose literary decisions (excepting where he touches on religion or politics) are justly entitled to the highest deference, Descartes has a better claim than any other individual, to be regarded as the father of that spirit of free inquiry, which, in modern Europe, has so remarkably displayed itself in all the various departments of knowledge. Of Bacon, he observes, “that though he possessed, in a most eminent degree, the genius of philosophy, he did not unite with it the genius of the sciences; and that the methods proposed by him for the investigation of truth, consisting entirely of precepts which he was unable to exemplify, had little or no effect in accelerating the rate of discovery.” As for Galileo, he remarks, on the other hand, “that his exclusive taste for mathematical and physical researches, disqualified him for communicating to the general mind that impulse of which it stood in need.”

“This honour,” he adds, “was reserved for Descartes, who combined in himself the characteristical endowments of both his predecessors. If, in the physical sciences, his march be less sure than that of Galileo—if his logic be less cautious than that of Bacon—yet the very temerity of his errors was instrumental to the progress of the human race. He gave activity to minds which the circumspection of his rivals could not awake from their lethargy. He called upon men to throw off the yoke of authority, acknowledging no influence but what reason should avow: And his call was obeyed by a multitude of followers, encouraged by the boldness, and fascinated by the enthusiasm of their leader.”

In these observations, the ingenious author has rashly generalized a conclusion deduced from the literary history of his own country. That the works of Bacon were but little read there till after the publication of D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse, is, I believe,