"There's no repose within this optic sphere; The common fate: he wanders wide, I hear, His central home is here as well as there!' In his essay on The History of Science, Samuel Brown endeavours to show the desirableness of presenting science 'clothed with its own biography;' and he points out a desideratum in this age when so many men of general culture wish to become acquainted with what is best in each of the sciences, and how it may be met. 'Facts are the body of science, and the idea of those facts is its spirit. In order that the poet, the artist, the man of letters, the politician, the professional person, or the man of general culture should become possessed of essential science, and crown himself with the very flower and fruitage of the long year of investigation, it is not necessary to enter the observatory, the laboratory, the museum, or the dissecting-room. Nor must he peruse the best text-books. The superficial volumes of popular science will not serve his purpose. It is another and a new class of works that is wanted. These must be brief and sculpturesque. They must at once lay bare the spirit of science after science; they must exhibit the ideas of the sciences and illustrate these ideas by as few and as principal facts as possible, containing shapely principles, and not a huddle of elementary observations. They must be metaphysical, rather than physical treatises. Their authors must have the same kind of ends in view as the wiser teachers of the mathematics. It is not the mathematics, but a mathetical way of thinking, not natural history, but a classific way of thinking, and not natural philosophy, but an inductive way of thinking, that are to be shed into the mind of the general student.' Entering upon the consideration of the manner in which a knowledge of nature has been gradually acquired, our author gives a full and critical exposition of the view propounded by Auguste Comte in La Philosophie Positive, of which the follow Comte's Epoch's of Science. 139 ing is an epitome, not taken, however, from the same, but from a later essay : "According to that vivacious, far-sighted, and muscular critic, there are, and in a manner must be, three principal epochs in the growth of each science, and of all the sciences together: the childish religious, the boyish metaphysical, and the manly positive epochs of develop ment. 'It needs scarcely be added that this great writer considers the positive or Baconian era as the consummation of all inquiry, and thinks the method of discovery by observation and induction the perfection of philosophy, destined one day to carry humanity to the heights of attainable bliss. It must be avowed in passing, and merely avowed, that this appears to be at once an error of fact and a breach of the very methodology which is exalted. There is surely a fourth epoch of scientific method beginning everywhere to dawn upon the world. It is preparing, as we have been accustomed to think, to combine the descendentalism of Plato and the idealists with the ascendental processes of Bacon and the sensationists, and likewise to render the longawaited union worthy of mankind, by shedding into it the spirit of Christ and his disciples. As a fine generalization of the past history of the purely ascendental sciences, however, the doctrine of Comte is most important and interesting, and it will always well repay the private labours of the task, to trace the evolutions of the law in the genesis of any science in particular, or of the sciences considered as an organic whole. At the same time it cannot be inexpedient to warn the English student that the word metaphysical, as applied by the French discoverer to his second epoch of development, is objectionable on several accounts, but mainly because it conveys a sneer at one of the sciences of which M. Comte is ignorant, and at a kind of thinking alien to the nature of his limited individual mind, but not, therefore, beyond the pale of human study. Hypothetical were a better epithet, for certainly hypothesis is no part of positive science, and hypothesis did constitute the soul (not the body, take notice) of every present inductive science before it grew altogether positive. Yet hypothesis, logically wielded, is a potent instrument in positive science. sternest positivist may readily be the greatest of hypothetists; and he that runs may read the fact, for it is blazoned all over the Book of the Chronicles of the kings of our Israel. Copernicus, and still more emphatically, if not obsequiously, his editors, Osiander and Rheticus, put forth the most memorable of works in modern positive science— the De Revolutionibus-as a hypothesis or possible view of the subject in hand. Newton wrote Hypotheses non fingo on the Principia; but neither was he slow to assert that no great discovery was ever made without a great guess. It was the canonizing of a profane hypothesis as a sacred fact, that was, as it still is, the vice of the second epoch of scientific life. A metaphysician might, therefore, have called it the suffictitious epoch, the day of the placing of figments underneath the seemings of nature, in order to the apparent under The standing of them; or, more simply, the fictitious stage of the growth of science. But how much more offensive the assignation of the blessed adjective religious to the first crude, polytheistic movements of the scientific spirit! To be brief, since the subject is really beyond our present bounds, this historical speculator's three ages might have been distinguished, by a more reverent and affectionate critic, as the superstitious, the fictitious, and the real.' Of this fourth epoch, which Compte ignored, and Brown calls the era of faith,' he speaks in the right spirit, though somewhat mystically. We believe in this epoch, and hope that its realization may be as complete and as speedy as our author anticipates. The two lay sermons on the theory of Christianity please us less than any other of the contents of these volumes. They belong to an early part of Samuel Brown's career, dating 1841, 1842; and thus, perhaps, do not represent his later views. It appears that a little company of the lay brethren of Christ Church were wont to assemble' for mutual instruction; and finding ourselves placed,' say they, 'midway between the Church and the world, the two great ends we constantly hold in view are the vindica'tion of the one and the conversion of the other. We would vindicate the former by telling the modern world what the 'Church really believes, and do our best towards the consumma'tion of the latter, by showing how conformable that belief is ' with all that can be known about the universe of God.' The object was good, the men were apparently in earnest, but those who teach must first learn; and the introductory address of Samuel Brown, under the grandiloquent soubriquet of Victorious Analysis, shows that he possessed little of the exactitude of mind required to fulfil his task. The theme is, 'By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac;' and in spasmodic language he contrasts the provinces of faith and analysis, which means much the same as other people mean by reason; and with especial reference to the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, he magnifies faith. But what is the idea which that word conveys to his mind? Not confidence in the character of Godin his well-attested statements, commands, and promises; but one of two things, either that reliance on some evidence or other, by which we believe in everything material or immaterial, or a passionate self-surrender to one's own religious impulses, whenever they cannot be traced to any intelligible source! With this last idea of faith he draws a picture of what passed in the mind of Abraham, which might serve, as we conceive, to represent the feelings of any devout worshipper of Moloch, and puts it before the reader as an admirable pattern. We hope we do not mis represent the writer; and we should not have referred to this juvenile effort had it not been so common now-a-days for men to set themselves up as expounders of what Christianity really is, while they themselves have not yet settled whether the history of the patriarchs be literal fact or poetic tradition, and decide in what sense the Bible is the word of God, according to the evershifting phases of their intuitional ideas. What would be thought of a man who should plunge into those regions of chemical philosophy which are now the battle-field of debate, and rudely pushing aside the men who have spent years in the study of the science, should begin to decide according to his own intuitions what facts were to be received, and what doctrines were true? Yet in some quarters this is the approved style of philosophizing when the ways of the Supreme Being form the subject, and eternal interests the stake. Touching on the verse, through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God,' occasion is taken to decry 'a priori demonstrations and arguments of design.' It would be curious to set our author to show how an argument from design can be itself constructed without what he calls, but we do not, faith; curious, too, to test this procedure of his by his own admirable canon :-'Enucleate the affirmation of almost any 'sect in any science, including theology and politics, and you 'have truth so far as it goes; winnow and catch its negations, and you have error.' But in the next sermon, 'The argument of 'design equal to nothing, or Nieuentytt and Paley versus David 'Hume, and St. Paul, he under the somewhat more modest appellation of Fidian Analysis, proves perfectly to his own satisfaction that the natural theologians undertake an impracticable labour; that from the diffusibility of gases, or any other facts of adaptation discovered in nature, we cannot infer by analogical reasoning that nature is the product of a designing mind, and the designer is God;' which doubtless we cannot, if by God we are necessarily to understand not a Maker, but a Creator-a Creator not only unlimited but illimitable in greatness, and Himself the Jehovah of the Bible. But then neither Paley nor his clear-thinking forerunners or successors, conceived that their deduction of a Maker, whom they called God, necessarily involved all this. We were not prepared to be told-' But allow that the 'inferred Designer really spoke the worlds into existence, and He 'alone. Still that creative Designer may not be God after all; ́for divinity, if proved at all, must be proved to be almighty in power, inexhaustible in wisdom, and boundless in love; but the 'universe cannot be proved to be anywise infinite in the literal sense of infinitude, it is only indefinitely vast, its magnitude compared with true immensity being a trifle, for all our telescopes 'can disclose, and the attributes of its inferred Creator may be 'less than infinite in kind and degree. Whatever is less than 'infinitude is infinitely less; and whatever is infinitely less 'than anything is nothing. THIS IS NOT GOD.' As though what is indefinitely vast were not to our understanding infinite. We call that infinitude of which we do not know, or cannot conceive a boundary, not that which we can demonstrate to be actually unbounded. If it were so, the Infinite One alone would have the right of employing the word even in relation to Himself. The same kind of errors appear to us to run through his metaphysical treatise, The Finite and the Infinite, though we have there the fruits of more matured and more reverent thinking. He starts with the assertion-'It is the inalienable prerogative ' of man to pray to God. It is the royal condition on which he wears the crown of nature; although the condition is ill-fulfilled, and his glory is therefore dim. In every clime and in every age, however, he builds himself an altar; nor is there any man, be his metaphysical creed what it may, or be he ever so far 'from God in the spirit of his mind, but sometimes utters him'self in willing or involuntary prayers.' Believing that man perceives the Almighty directly, and not through any conscious or unconscious demonstration, he attempts to solve the metaphysical problem of how this comes to pass. Starting with the idea of Me, he inquires what is the opposite of this idea; for each idea involves its antithesis, as beauty supposes deformity, unity multiplicity, and so on; and this he conceives not to be the non ego of the Germans, for, says he, 'Non-me is no more the 'logical antithesis of Me, than non-beauty is that of beauty, or 'than non-unity is that of unity. The opposite involved in Me 'is Thou. The idea of Me is grounded in being, and doing; and 'its true antithesis must also be grounded in being, and doing;' in fact, must be like Me, a person. And Me is finite; Thou, therefore, must be infinite. Such our author surmises to be 'an analysis of the genuine and unfallen self-consciousness of man, exhibiting the rational ground and secret process of that sacred 'intuition, whereby he beholds Him whom no man hath seen, or can see, with the eye of sense, or that of the finite understanding.' After showing that the mere sensationalist and the mere idealist are alike liable to forget God, and to disbelieve in prayer, he enters on the controversy as to the perception of matter. Into this we shall not follow him, nor yet into his attempt at elucidation of the reason why man intuitively sees and believes in the world of sensation, and that he immediately refers that world to |