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Untitled Article
nently enhanced the dignity , by increasing the precision of the science , would not appear to have spoiled it for his hand : and were a question to arise , what branch of it would retain the greatest attractions for a mind like his , no one could hesitate to answer , electro-chemistry , in which there is mystery enough still to stimulate an ardour like his , and glimpses enough of wonderful
and extensive laws , to inspire the investigator with the perpetual feeling that he is on the eve of great discoveries . Could we have been permitted to select a period in the history of science with whose spirit his mind was most congenial , we should have set him down among the contemporaries or immediate followers of Bacon ; when , to a new and intelligent system of inquiry , nature began to whisper her mighty secrets ; when every penetrative mind
that understood their value , rushed to her shrine and listened reverentially to the great oracle ; when the rapidity of discovery ,
following close on a dreary track of centuries barren of philosophy , gratified the love both of the wonderful and of the true ; and when the passionate relish for fresh knowledge prevented the observance of definitive boundaries between its different regions , and tempted the inquirer to a wide and adventurous range . Dr .
Priestley has recorded of himself , that he exercised without difficulty the power of exclusive attention to any object of study ; but it would be a great error to suppose that this mental habit in him , was the same with that jrrofound and steady abstraction which characterised the intellect of Newton , and amid whose stillness
he slowly passed the upward steps of induction to the subhmest law of the material creation . Dr . Priestley ' s attention was eager rather than patient , active rather than laborious ; suited to subjects whose relations are various and simple , rather than few and intricate ; inclined to traverse kindred provinces of thought in
quest of illustration , more than to remain immovable in the construction of a proof . His mind would become restive , if it had not scope . It was incapable of proceeding long in the linear track of mathematical logic . The illumination of his genius was rather diffusive than concentrated . He could never have
singled out any one phenomenon , and planted it in an intense focus of intellectual light , till he had fused it into its elements , and could exhibit its minutest component in distinct separation from the rest . The kind of accurate observation , and cautious analysis and finished induction which Dr . Bradley manifested in his discovery of the aberration of light , and which at once detected , measured , and explained by reference to a new cause , one of the minutest phenomena of the heavens , must be sought in a different
order of intellect from Dr . Priestley ' s . During the origin of a science , when the object is to accumulate facts and arrange them according to their more obvious affinities , the quality most needed by the philosopher is the quick perception of analogies which we have ascribed to Dr . Priestley .
Untitled Article
On the Life , Character , and Writings of Dr . Priestley , 87
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1833, page 87, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2608/page/15/
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