the nation's councils; aspiring, ignoring no useful application, but content with no achievement short of a final philosophy of causes; inductive, taking nothing for granted but facts of experiment, and seeking to ascend therefrom to a generalization which shall explain them,—this is the sort of man which in our day we consider sound and useful and grand. Such was Swedenborg, the assessor. A more penetrating, untiring, laborious, and practical man of science never lived.
He possessed a quality of analysis so searching and discriminative as to be altogether microscopic in its character and application, united with a most wonderful power of generalization. By these faculties of his mind he was enabled to combine the strength of both the old and new philosophy, and by a clear analytic and synthetic comparison of every whole with its parts, and of the parts with the whole, he did what had never been done before, and opened science to the light of reason, and to its true position as a servant of rational philosophy. His method not only enabled him to anticipate conclusions which experimental science has been tardy enough in reaching, but it brought him face to face with the problems which in our
