OUTLINE OF THE LAWS OF THOUGHT. INTRODUCTION. Εἴπωμεν οὖν διὰ βραχέων τίς ἡ πρόθεσις καὶ τίς ὁ σκοπὸς πάσης τῆς ἀναλυτικῆς ἐπιστήμης. ALEXANDER APHROD. "Nullam dicere maximarum rerum artem esse, cum minimarum sine arte nulla sit, hominum est parum considerate loquentium atque in maximis rebus errantium." CICERO. Good VERY process has laws, known or unknown, according to which it must take place. A consciousness of them is so 66 Art far from being necessary to the process, that we cannot discover what they are, except by analysing the results it has left us. Poems must have been written before Horace could compose an of Poetry," which required the analysis and judicious criticism of works already in existence. Men poured out burning speeches and kindled their own emotions in the hearer's breast, before an Art of B Rhetoric could be constructed. They tilled the ground, crossed the river or the sea, healed their sicknesses with medicinal plants, before agriculture, chemistry, navigation, and medicine, had become sciences. And wherever our knowledge of the laws of any process has become more complete and accurate; as in astronomy, by the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system; in history, by a wiser estimate than our fathers had the means of forming, of civilisation and its tendencies; in chemistry, by such discoveries as the atomic theory and the wonders of electro-magnetism; our progress has been made, not by mere poring in the closet over the rules already known, to revise and correct them by their own light, but by coming back again and again to the process as it went on in nature, to apply our rules to facts, and see how far they contradicted or fell short of explaining them. Astronomers turned to the stars, where the laws they sought for were day and night fulfilling themselves before their eyes; historians collected facts from the records of different countries, watched men of many races, of various climates, differently helped or hindered, for there, they knew, the true principles of history were to be read; and chemists, in the laboratory, untwisted the very fibres of matter, and watched its every pulse and change, to come at the laws which underlaid them. "Even geometry," says the great chemist, |