prehends and shines through the particular purpose of each several dialogue; and this is to establish the sources, to evolve the principles, and exemplify the art of METHOD. This is the clue, without which it would be difficult to exculpate the noblest productions of the divine philosopher from the charge of being tortuous and labyrinthine in their progress, and unsatisfactory in their ostensible results. The latter indeed appear not seldom to have been drawn for the purpose of starting a new problem, rather than that of solving the one proposed as the subject of the previous discussion. But with the clear insight that the purpose of the writer is not so much to establish any particular truth, as to remove the obstacles, the continuance of which is preclusive of all truth; the whole scheme assumes a different aspect, and justifies itself in all its dimensions. We see, that to open anew a well of springing water, not to cleanse the stagnant tank, or fill, bucket by bucket, the leaden cistern; that the EDUCATION of the intellect, by awakening the principle and method of self-development, was his proposed object, not any specific inVOL. III. N formation that can be conveyed into it from without: not to assist in storing the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting-rogm, but to place it in such relations of circumstance as should gradually excite the germinal power that craves no knowledge but what it can take up into itself, what it can appropriate, and re-produce in fruits of its own. To shape, to dye, to paint over, and to mechanize the mind, he resigned, as their proper trade, to the sophists, against whom he waged open and unremitting war. For the ancients, as well as the moderns, had their machinery for the extemporaneous mintage of intellects, by means of which, off-hand, as it were, the scholar was enabled to make a figure on any and all subjects, on any and all occasions. They too had their glittering VAPORS, that (as the comic poet tells us) fed a host of sophists— μεγάλαι θέαι ανδράσιν ἀργοῖς Αΐπερ γνώμην και διάλεξιν καὶ νοῦν ἡμῖν παρέχουσιν, Καὶ τερατέιαν καὶ περίλεξιν καὶ κρουσιν και κατάληψιν. ΑΡΙΣΤΟΦ. Νεφ. Σκ. δ. IMITATED. Great goddesses are they to lazy folks, Thoughts brisk as bees, and pathos soft and thawy. In fine, as improgressive arrangement is not Method, so neither is a mere mode or set fashion of doing a thing. Are further facts required? We appeal to the notorious fact that ZOOLOGY, Soon after the commencement of the latter half of the last century, was falling abroad, weighed down and crushed, as it were, by the inordinate number and manifoldness of facts and phænomena apparently separate, without evincing the least promise of systematizing itself by any inward combination, any vital interdependence of its parts. JOHN HUNTER, who appeared at times almost a stranger to the grand conception, which yet never ceased to work in him as his genius and governing spirit, rose at length in the horizon of physiology and comparative anatomy. In his printed works, the one directing thought seems evermore to flit before him, twice or thrice only to have been seized, and after a momentary detention to have been again let go: as if the words of the charm had been incomplete, and it had appeared at its own will only to mock its calling. At length, in the astonishing preparations for his museum, he constructed it for the scientific apprehension out of the unspoken alphabet of nature. Yet notwithstanding the imperfection in the annunciation of the idea, how exhilirating have been the results! We dare appeal to * ABERNETHY, to EVERARD HOME, to HATCHETT, whose communication to Sir Everard on the egg and its analogies, in a recent paper of the latter (itself of high excellence) in the Philosophical Transactions, we point out as being, in the proper sense of the term, the development of a FACT in the * Since the first delivery of this sheet, Mr. Abernethy has realized this anticipation, dictated solely by the writer's wishes, and at that time justified only by his general admiration of Mr. A.'s talents and principles; but composed without the least knowledge that he was then actually engaged in proving the assertion here hazarded, at large and in detail. See his eminent "Physiological Lectures," lately published in one volume octavo. history of physiology, and to which we refer as exhibiting a luminous instance of what we mean by the discovery of a central phænomenon. To these we appeal, whether whatever is grandest in the views of CUVIER be not either a reflection of this light or a continuation of its rays, well and wisely directed through fit media to its appropriate object.* We have seen that a previous act and conception of the mind is indispensible even to the mere semblances of Method: that neither fashion, mode, nor orderly arrangement can be produced without a prior purpose, and "a pre-cogitation ad intentionem ejus quod quæritur," though this purpose may have been itself excited, and this "pre-cogitation" itself ab • Nor should it be wholly unnoticed, that Cuvier, who, we understand, was not born in France, and is not of unmixed French extraction, had prepared himself for his illustrious labors (as we learn from a reference in the first chapter of his great work, and should have concluded from the general style of thinking, though the language betrays suppression, as of one who doubted the sympathy of his readers or audience) in a very different school of methodology and philosophy than Paris could have afforded. |