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/67

Rh “3. 🇬🇷, or the doctrine of signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also 🇬🇷, Logic. The business of this is to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others.

“This seems to me,” continues Mr Locke, “the first and most general, as well as natural, division of the objects of our understanding; for a man can employ his thoughts about nothing but either the contemplation of things themselves, for the discovery of truth, or about the things in his own power, which are his own actions, for the attainment of his own ends; or the signs the mind makes use of, both in one and the other, and the right ordering of them for its clearer information. All which three, viz. things as they are in themselves knowable; actions as they depend on us, in order to happiness; and the right use of signs, in order to knowledge; being toto cælo different, they seemed to me to be the three great provinces of the intellectual world, wholly separate and distinct one from another.”

From the manner in which Mr Locke expresses himself in the above quotation, he appears evidently to have considered the division proposed in it as an original idea of his own; and yet the truth is, that it coincides exactly with what was generally adopted by the philosophers of ancient Greece. “The ancient Greek Philosophy,’’ says Mr Smith, “was divided into three great branches, Physics, or Natural Philosophy; Ethics, or Moral Philosophy; and Logic. This general division,” he adds, “seems perfectly agreeable to the nature of things.” Mr Smith afterwards observes, in strict conformity to Locke’s definitions, (of which, however, he seems to have had no recollection when he wrote this passage), “That, as the human mind and the Deity, in whatever their essence may be supposed to consist, are parts of the great system of the universe, and parts, too, productive of the most important effects, whatever was taught in the ancient schools of Greece concerning their nature, made a part of the system of physics.”

Dr Campbell, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, has borrowed from the Grecian schools the same very extensive use of the words physics and physiology, which he employs as synonymous terms; comprehending under this title “not merely Natural History, Astronomy, Geography, Mechanics, Optics, Hydrostatics, Meteorology, Medicine, Chemistry, but also Natural Theology and Psychology, which,” he observes, “have been, in his opinion, most unnaturally disjoined from Physiology by philosophers.” “Spirit,” he adds, “which here com-