ment of Learning.” This survey and arrangement of these definite, solid, and self-consistent sections of knowledge, appears to be the appropriate business of the philosophers of the ensuing age. It implies a clear account of what that is which entitles any portion of knowledge to the designation of scientific, what the methods are by which vague, and narrow or imperfect knowledge may become science, what the principles may be which mark off one science into a province distinct from another, and what the bond of connexion among all the sciences is, with the scale of their relative value and importance, and the place of each as a part of that organic whole into which the philosophic mind seeks to mould all its knowledge. The strength and precision of mind needed for a task like this, must be, in a great measure, regulated by the success of metaphysicians in detecting First Principles.
Sir William Hamilton has greatly illustrated metaphysical science by the clearness and distinctness which he has infused into the theory of common sense expounded by Reid, and maintained by him in common with the great majority of ancient and modern philosophers, it being, “notwithstanding many schismatic aberrations, the one catholic and perennial philosophy,” while the very name common sense “is the term under which that doctrine has been most familiarly known, at least in the Western world.”[1]
- ↑ See, in the Dissertation on "Common Sense," 106 testimonies to this effect—a singular document, illustrative of the "succession" of metaphysicians, and of the analogy of metaphysical speculation, during three
