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/71

Rh of uniting the opinions of the learned, in favour of any one scheme of partition. To prefix, therefore, such a scheme to a work which is professedly to be carried on by a set of unconnected writers, would be equally presumptuous and useless; and, on the most favourable supposition, could tend only to fetter, by means of dubious definitions, the subsequent freedom of thought and of expression. The example of the French Encyclopédie cannot be here justly alleged as a precedent. The preliminary pages by which it is introduced were written by the two persons who projected the whole plan, and who considered themselves as responsible, not only for their own admirable articles, but for the general conduct of the execution; whereas, on the present occasion, a porch was to be adapted to an irregular edifice, reared, at different periods, by different architects. It seemed, accordingly, most advisable to avoid, as much as possible, in these introductory Essays, all innovations in language, and, in describing the different arts and sciences, to follow scrupulously the prevailing and most intelligible phraseology. The task of defining them, with a greater degree of precision, properly devolves upon those to whose province it belongs, in the progress of the work, to unfold in detail their elementary principles.

The sciences to which I mean to confine my observations are Metaphysics, Ethics, and Political Philosophy; understanding, by Metaphysics, not the Ontology and Pneumatology of the schools, but the inductive Philosophy of the Human Mind; and limiting the phrase Political Philosophy almost exclusively to the modern science of Political Economy; or (to express myself in terms at once more comprehensive and more precise) to that branch of the theory of legislation which, according to Bacon’s definition, aims to ascertain those “Leges legum, ex quibus informatio peti potest quid in singulis legibus bene aut perperam positum aut constitutum sit.” The close affinity between these three departments of knowledge, and the easy transitions by which the curiosity is invited from the study of any one of them to that of the other two, will sufficiently appear from the following Historical Review. 1em