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    gies , his faith in the consistency of creation ' s laws , and his consequent passion for simplicity , were all available as means of detecting error , and aids in the discovery of truth . And the excellence which these qualities enabled him to attain in his several pursuits , was of the same kind in all . In none did they

    confer on him superlative merit ; in some , at least , they led him into great faults ; but in every one they fitted him to be the able and dauntless explorer , powerful to penetrate the terra incognita of mystery , and quick to return enriched with the spoils of fresh thought . Year after year he visited the temple of truth , and hung upon its walls some new exuviae ; and who can wonder

    that his offerings , in their abundance , were more miscellaneous than rare ; that they consisted not always of the gold and the silver , which could be for ever deposited in the sacred treasury , but sometimes of the scattered arms and fragments of wreck which were of little worth but as trophies of victory . He was the ample collector of materials for discovery , rather than the

    final discoverer himself ; a sign of approaching order rather than the producer of order himself We remember an amusing German play , designed as a satire upon the philosophy of Atheism , in which Adam walks across the stage , going to be created ; and , though a paradox , it may be said that truth , as it passed through Dr . Priestley ' s mind , was going to be created ; the requisite

    elements were there ; the vital principle was stirring amid them , and producing the incipient types of structures that were yet to be ; but there was much that was unfit to undergo organization , much that could never be transmuted into forms of beauty , or filled with the inspiration of life ; and there must be other processes , before the mass emerges a graceful and a breathing frame .

    The characteristic qualities of Dr . Priestley ' s understanding led him to prosecute , with the greatest ardour , those subjects of inquiry in which but little progress had been made . The earlier and less exact stage of a science , which promises a great affluence of new phenomena , and admits of only the lower degree of generalization , and prepares the approach to the establishment of

    merely empirical laws , was that to which his powers were adapted . At a more advanced period of its history , when the field of observation is narrowed , and the demand for precise deduction increased , and where no appeal to fact can be of use , unless of the most refined and delicate kind , his faculties could have found no appropriate employment . In the age of Galileo he would probably have

    gamed a reputation for discoveries in optics or astronomy : in our days he might have aided the progress of geology ; but in his own generation the former had passed , while the latter had not reached the point at which alone he was able to apply an effective stimulus . It may be doubted whether , if he were living now , he would not find chemistry in advance of bis peculiar genius ; whether its greatest discovery , the Jaw of definite proportions , which has emi-

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    86 On the Life * Character * and Writing of Dr . Priestley

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1833, page 86, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2608/page/14/