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Untitled Article
the sense or acts upon the feelings : Science , as it is grasped and mastered by the reflective faculties of the mind : Poetry presents us with partial sketches , and transient glimpses of nature as it really exists ; Science is the effort of reason to overcome the multiplicity of impressions , with which nature overwhelms it , by dis * tributing them into classes , and by devising forms of expression ,
which comprehend in one view an infinite variety of objects and events . The mechanical arts stand in the same relation to Science , as the fine arts to Poetry . As the latter express an individual feeling , or embody the conception of an individual reality ; so the former are the application to practice , as in the case ., for example , of the steam-engine , of the general conception of a power or agency , abstracted from a great number of individual instances , in which it has been seen to operate .
The basis of all knowledge is such an extensive induction of particulars , as leads to general definitions and fundamental axioms , and furnishes the premises , from which inferences may be deduced . The most perfect sciences are those which treat of motion , figure , and quantity , . because these qualities form the simplest elements of matter : they present themselves to us in every combination ;
and we cannot think of matter apart from them . The mind being perpetually conversant with them , soon becomes perfectly familiar witli their ever-recurring phenomena ; and , learning to abstract the essential from the accidental , rapidly accumulates a body of definitions and axioms , out of which it elaborates by a chain of intuitive evidence a series of general propositions , whose truth is
indisputable and universal . The reasoning , however , in mathematics is not in its essence different from that in physics and morals : in both cases , it is founded ultimately on an examination of facts , a comparison of ideas ; and in both cases , the result is embodied in a general proposition expressing a certain relation between its subject and its predicate . The difference therefore lies not in the
reasoning , but in the facts , of the two cases * la mathematics , the facts investigated are strictly universal , which in physics and morals they never can be entirely . In mathematics , the ideas compared in any particular case are precisely identical with those , that would be compared in any parallel case , and hence the certainty and universality of the general inference . When we penetrate deeper into nature , and come into contact with the mysteries
of chemistry and physiology , though great ultimate principles may be reduced to mechanical laws , and expressed with mathematical precision , yet in a great majority of cases truth can only be approximated . There cannot be the certainty , that the inductioa is complete , and that every element has been comprehended in the general fact , that would justify our adopting a certain conclusion respecting it . In morals the uncertainty increases , because the elements that may possibly enter into , and
Untitled Article
82 $ On the Application of the Term *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1834, page 328, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2633/page/16/
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