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/68

14 prises only the Supreme Being and the human soul, is surely as much included under the notion of natural object as body is; and is knowable to the philosopher purely um the same way, by observation and experience.”

A similar train of thinking led the late celebrated M. Turgot to comprehend under the name of Physics, not only Natural Philosophy (as that phrase is understood by the Newtonians), but Metaphysics, Logic, and even History.

Notwithstanding all this weight of authority, it is difficult to reconcile one’s self to an arrangement which, while it classes with Astronomy, with Mechanics, with Optics, and with Hydrostatics, the strikingly contrasted studies of Natural Theology and of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, disunites from the two last the far more congenial sciences of Ethics and of Logic. The human mind, it is true, as well as the material world which surrounds it, forms a part of the great system of the Universe; but is it possible to conceive two parts of the same whole more completely dissimilar, or rather more diametrically opposite, in all their characteristical attributes? Is not the one the appropriate field and province of observation;—a power habitually awake to all the perceptions and impressions of the bodily organs? and does not the other fall exclusively under the cognizance of reflection,—an operation which inverts all the ordinary habits of the understanding,—abstracting the thoughts from every sensible object, and even striving to abstract them from every sensible image? What abuse of language can be greater, than to apply a common name to departments of knowledge which invite the curiosity in directions precisely contrary, and which tend to form intellectual talents, which, if not altogether incompatible, are certainly not often found united in the same individual? The word Physics, in particular, which, in our language, long and constant use has restricted to the phenomena of Matter, cannot fail to strike every ear as anomalously, and therefore illogically, applied, when extended to those of Thought and of Consciousness.

Nor let it be imagined that these observations assume any particular theory about the nature or essence of Mind. Whether we adopt, on this point, the language of the Material-

12