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/57

Rh 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 developement of its powers, the successive steps by which 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 docs 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 philosophising 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.