Page:Herschel - A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831).djvu/118

 

CHAP. III.

Of the State of Physical Science in General, previous to the Age of Galileo and Bacon.

(96.) It is to our immortal countryman Bacon that we owe the broad announcement of this grand and fertile principle; and the developement of the idea, that the whole of natural philosophy consists entirely of a series of inductive generalizations, commencing with the most circumstantially stated particulars, and carried up to universal laws, or axioms, which comprehend in their statements every subordinate degree of generality, and of a corresponding series of inverted reasoning from generals to particulars, by which these axioms are traced back into their remotest consequences, and all particular propositions deduced from them; as well those by whose immediate consideration we rose to their discovery, as those of which we had no previous knowledge. In the course of this descent to particulars, we must of necessity encounter all those facts on which the arts and works that tend to the accommodation of human life depend, and acquire thereby the command of an unlimited practice, and a disposal of the powers of nature co-extensive with those powers themselves. A noble promise, indeed, and one which ought, surely, to animate us to the highest exertion of our faculties; especially since we have already such convincing proof that it is neither vain nor rash, but, on the contrary, has been, and continues