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created spiritual worlds adopt; but while rejecting their method he may still gratefully gather the good fruits of their lives, and profit by the instruction which is to be obtained from the study of even the most erratic orbits. Now, as ever, and for ever, it is true that the wrath, the folly, the madness of men are made to praise Him whom sun and moon, fire and heat, winter and summer, mountains and hills, seas and floods, the green things of the earth, and the holy and humble men of heart, bless, praise, and magnify for ever, but whom systems of theology and the prophets thereof have so much misrepresented and degraded.

THE THEORY OF VITALITY.1

IT has been the custom of certain disciples of the socalled Positive Philosophy to repudiate as extravagant the well-known opinion of Protagoras, that man was the measure of the universe. If the proposition be understood of man as he is known to himself by the revelations of self-consciousness, there is unquestionably great reason for its rejection; but if it be applied to him as an objective study, it is manifest that modern science is tending to prove it by no means so absurd as it has been sometimes deemed. Day by day, indeed, is it becoming more and more clear that, as Sir T. Browne has it, man "parallels nature in the cosmography of himself;" that, in truth, we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume." 2 The "heaven-descended σeautóv❞ acquires new value as a maxim inculcating on man the objective study of himself.

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1 BRITISH AND FOREIGN MEDICO-CHIRURGICAL REVIEW, No. 64, 1863. 2 Religio Medici.

The earliest cultivators of Grecian philosophyThales, Anaximenes, and Diogenes of Apollonia—did seek objectively for the dpxý or first principle of things common to man and the rest of nature. This primitive kind of induction was soon, however, abandoned for the easier and speedier deduction from the subjective facts of consciousness; so that, as the German philosopher is said to have done with the elephant, man constructed the laws of an external world out of the depths of his own consciousness. Because an individual was conscious of certain passions which influenced his conduct, he fancied that natural bodies were affected in their relations to one another by like passions. Hence the phenomena of nature were explained by sympathies, antipathies, loves, discords: oil had an antipathy to water; nature abhorred a vacuum. Love was the creative force which produced development and harmony; Hate, the destructive force which produced disorder and discord. The method was only a phase of the anthropomorphism by which the Dryad was placed in the tree, the Naiad in the fountain, and the gods of mankind were created by man.

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The result of such a method was inevitable. in a language there is but one word for two or three different meanings, as happens in all languages before the cultivation of science-when, for example, the loadstone is said to attract iron, the earth to attract heavy bodies, the plant to attract moisture, and one mind to attract another, without further differentiation— there necessarily is an ambiguity about words; disputes

thereupon arise, and the unavoidable issue is sophistry and sophists. That was a result which the ingenious and active mind of Greece soon reached. In scientific nomenclature it is constantly becoming necessary to discard words which are in common use, because of their vagueness and want of precision; for as it is with life objectively, and as it is with cognition or life subjec tively, so must it be with language in which the phenomena are expressed. A scientific nomenclature must rightly present a progress from the general to the special, must reflect in its increasing specialization the increased specialization of human adaptation to external nature. As might be expected, Plato and Aristotle both recognized the evil in Greece, and both tried to check it. The metaphysics, analytics, &c. of the latter have been described as a dictionary of general terms, "the process throughout being first to discover and establish definite meanings, and then to appropriate to each a several word." "" 1 But it is in vain to attempt to establish words except as living outgrowths of actual facts in nature. The method was a mistaken one; there was not an intending of the mind to the realities of external nature,

1 Coleridge's Literary Correspondence. It is for this attempt, praiseworthy surely as far as it went, that Bacon is unduly severe upon Aristotle in some parts. Thus: "And herein I cannot a little marvel at the philosopher Aristotle, that did proceed in such a spirit of difference and contradiction towards all antiquity, undertaking not only to form new words of science at pleasure, but to confound and extinguish all ancient wisdom." (De Augmentis Scientiarum.) And again: "Aristotle, as though he had been of the race of the Ottomans, thought he could not reign except the first thing he did he killed all his brethren." (Ibid.)

and knowledge was barren, wanting those "fruits and invented works" which Bacon pronounces to be, as it were, sponsors and sureties for the truth of philosophy."

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Much the same thing happened in the earlier part of the Middle Ages. The mysticism and sophistry which then prevailed, the endless and unprofitable but learned and ingenious disputes concerning empty propositions and words which had no definite meaning, might be said to represent the wasted efforts and unavailing strength of a blind giant. But as the infant, moved by an internal impulse, at first strives unconsciously for its mother's breast and draws its nourishment therefrom, gradually awakening thereby to a consciousness of the mother who supplies it, so the human mind for a time gathered unconsciously the material of its knowledge from nature, until it was gradually awakened to a full consciousness of the fruitful bosom which was supplying it. The alchemist, moved by his avarice and the instinct of a unity in nature, and the astrologer, moved by the feeling of a destiny governing human actions, both lighted on treasures which, though then not appreciated, were yet not lost; for of astrology came astronomy, and from alchemy, in the fulness of time, was born chemistry. In Roger Bacon, who successfully interrogated nature in the spirit of the inductive method, we see the human mind instinctively and, as it were, unconsciously striving after the true source of knowledge; while in the Chancellor Bacon, who established the principles and systematized the rules of the inductive philosophy, we see it

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