Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/303

Rh be defined as the science of all that we know, feel, remember and believe: inasmuch as our knowledge, sensations, memory and faith constitute the universe considered relatively to human identity. Logic, or the science of words must no longer be confounded with metaphysics or the science of facts. Words are the instruments of mind whose capacities it becomes the Metaphysician accurately to know, but they are not mind, nor are they portions of mind. The discoveries of Horne Tooke in philology do not, as he has asserted, throw light upon Metaphysics, they only render the instruments recqu[is]ite to its perception more exact and accurate.

Aristotle and his followers, Locke and most of the modern Philosophers gave Logic the name of Metaphysics. Nor have those who are accustomed to profess the greatest veneration for the inductive system of Lord Bacon adhered with sufficient scrupulousness to its regulations. They have professed indeed (and who have not professed?) to deduce their conclusions from indisputable facts. How came many of those facts to be called indisputable? What sanctioning correspondence unites a concatenation of syllogisms? Their promises of deducing all systems from facts has too often been performed by appealing in favour of these pretended realities to the obstinate preconceptions of the multitude; or by the most preposterous mistake of a name for a thing. They