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a people, have, since the beginning or middle of the seventeenth century, been remarkably free from superstition; and, notwithstanding the efforts of their government, they are very averse to ecclesiastical power: so that, although their history displays the protective principle in its political form, it supplies little evidence respecting its religious form; while, in our own country, the evidence is also scanty. Hence, my intention is, to give a view of Spanish history; because in it we may trace the full results of that protection against error which the spiritual classes are always eager to afford. In Spain, the church has, from a very early period, possessed more authority, and the clergy have been more influential, both with the people and the government, than in any other country; it will, therefore, be convenient to study in Spain the laws of ecclesiastical development, and the manner in which that development affects the national interests. Another circumstance, which operates on the intellectual progress of a nation, is the method of investigation that its ablest men habitually employ. This method can only be one of two kinds; it must be either inductive, or deductive. Each of these belongs to a different form of civilization, and is always accompanied by a different style of thought, particularly in regard to religion and science. These differences are of such immense importance, that, until their laws are known, we cannot be said to understand the real history of past events. Now, the two extremes of the difference are, undoubtedly, Germany and the United States; the Germans being preeminently deductive, the Americans inductive. But Germany and America are, in so many other respects, diametrically opposed to each other, that I have thought it expedient to study the operations of the deductive and inductive spirit in countries between which a closer analogy exists; because the greater the similarity between two nations, the more easily can we trace the consequences of any single divergence, and the more conspicuous do the laws of that divergence become. Such an opportunity occurs in the history of Scotland, as compared with that of England. Here we have two nations, bordering on each other, speaking the same language, reading the same literature, and knit together by the same interests. And yet it is a truth, which seems to have escaped attention, but the proof of which I shall fully detail, that until the last thirty or forty years, the Scotch intellect has been even more entirely deductive than the English intellect has been inductive. The inductive tendencies of the English mind, and the almost superstitious reverence with which we cling to them, have been noticed with regret by

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a few, and a very few, of our ablest men.13 On the other hand, in Scotland, particularly during the eighteenth century, the great thinkers, with hardly an exception, adopted the deductive method. Now, the characteristic of deduction, when applied to branches of knowledge not yet ripe for it, is, that it increases the number of hypotheses from which we reason downwards, and brings into disrepute the slow and patient ascent peculiar to inductive inquiry. This desire to grasp at truth by speculative, and, as it were, foregone conclusions, has often led the way to great discoveries; and no one, properly instructed, will deny its immense value. But when it is universally followed, there is imminent danger lest the observation of mere empirical uniformities should be neglected; and lest thinking men should grow impatient at those small and proximate generalizations, which, according to the inductive scheme, must invariably precede the larger and higher ones. Whenever this impatience actually occurs, there is produced serious mischief. For these lower

generalizations form a neutral ground, which speculative minds and practical minds possess in common, and on which they meet. If this ground is cut away, the meeting is impossible. In such case, there arises among the scientific classes an undue contempt for inferences which the experience of the vulgar has drawn, but of which the laws seem inexplicable; while, among the practical classes, there arises a disregard of speculations so wide, so magnificent, and of which the intermediate and preliminary steps are hidden from their gaze. The results of this in Scotland are highly curious, and are, in several respects, similar to those which we find in Germany; since in both countries the intellectual classes have long been remarkable for their boldness of investigation and their freedom from prejudice, and the people at large equally remarkable for the number of their superstitions and the strength of their prejudices. In Scotland, this is even more striking than in Germany; because the Scotch, owing to causes which have been little studied, are, in practical matters, not only industrious and provident, but singularly shrewd. This, however, in the higher departments of life, has availed them nothing; and, while there is no country which possesses a more original, inquisitive, and innovating literature than Scotland does, so also is there no country, equally civilized, in which so much of the spirit of the Middle Ages still lingers,

13 Particularly Coleridge and Mr. John Mill. But, with the greatest possible respect for Mr. Mill's profound work on Logic, I must venture to think that he has ascribed too much to the influence of Bacon in encouraging the inductive spirit, and too little to those other circumstances which gave rise to the Baconian philosophy, and to which that philosophy owes its success.

in which so many absurdities are still believed, and in which it would be so easy to rouse into activity the old feelings of religious intolerance.

The divergence, and indeed the hostility, thus established between the practical and speculative classes, is the most important fact in the history of Scotland, and is partly cause and partly effect of the predominance of the deductive method. For this descending scheme being opposed to the ascending or inductive scheme, neglects those lower generalizations which are the only ones that both classes understand, and, therefore, the only ones where they sympathize with each other. The inductive method, as popularized by Bacon, gave great prominence to these lower or proximate truths; and this, though it has often made the intellectual classes in England too utilitarian, has at all events saved them from that state of isolation in which they would otherwise have remained. But in Scotland the isolation has been almost complete, because the deductive method has been almost universal. Full evidence of this will be collected in the next volume; but, that I may not leave the subject entirely without illustration, I will notice very briefly the principal instances that occurred during those three generations in which Scotch literature reached its highest excellence.

During this period, which comprises nearly a century, the tendency was so unmistakeable, as to form a striking phenomenon in the annals of the human mind. The first great symptom was a movement begun by Simson, professor at the University of Glasgow, and continued by Stewart, professor at the University of Edinburgh. These able men made strenuous efforts to revive the pure Greek geometry, and depreciate the algebraic or symbolical analysis. Hence there arose among them, and among their disciples, a love of the most refined methods of solution, and a contempt for those easier, but less elegant ones, which we owe to algebra.15 Here we clearly see

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14 Simson was appointed in 1711; and even before he began to lecture, he drew up "a translation of the three first books of L'Hospital's Conic Sections, in which geometrical demonstrations are substituted for the algebraical of the original, according to Mr. Simson's early taste on this subject." Trail's Life and Writings of Robert Simson, 1812, 4to, p. 4. This was probably the rudiment of his work on Conic SecOn tions, published in 1735. Montucla, Histoire des Mathématiques, vol. iii. p. 12. the difference between the ancient and modern schemes, there are some ingenious, though perhaps scarcely tenable, remarks in Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Mind, vol. ii. p. 354 seq. and p. 380. See also Comte, Philosophie Positive, vol. i. pp. 383-395. Matthew Stewart, the mathematical professor at Edinburgh, was the father of Dugald. See, respecting him and his crusade against the modern analysis, Bower's History of the University of Edinburgh, vol. ii. pp. 357-360, vol. iii. p. 249; and a strange passage in First Report of the British Association, p. 59.

One of Simson's great reasons for recommending the old analysis, was that it was "more elegant" than the comparatively modern practice of introducing alge

the isolating and esoteric character of a scheme which despises what ordinary understandings can quickly master, and which had rather proceed from the ideal to the tangible, than mount from the tangible to the ideal. Just at the same time, the same spirit was displayed, in another branch of inquiry, by Hutcheson, who, though an Irishman by birth, was educated in the University of Glasgow, and was professor there. In his celebrated moral and æsthetic researches, he, in the place of inductive reasoning from palpable facts, substituted deductive reasoning from impalpable principles; ignoring the immediate and practical suggestions of the senses, and believing that by a hypothetical assumption of certain laws, he could descend upon the facts, instead of rising from the facts in order to learn the laws.1 His philosophy exercised immense influence among metaphysicians; and his method of working downwards, from the abstract to the concrete, was adopted by another and a still greater Scotchman, the illustrious Adam Smith. How Smith favoured the deductive form of investigation, is apparent in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, likewise in his Essay on Language,1s and even in his fragment on the History of Astronomy, in which he, from general considerations, undertook to prove what the march of astronomical discovery must have been, instead of first ascertaining what it had been. The Wealth of Nations, again, is

braic calculations into geometry. See Trail's Simson, 1812, 4to, pp. 27, 67; a valuable work, which Lord Brougham, in his hasty life of Simson, calls " a very learned and exceedingly ill-written, indeed hardly readable" book. Brougham's Men of Letters and Science, vol. i. p. 482, 8vo, 1845. Dr. Trail's style is clearer, and his sentences are less involved, than Lord Brougham's; and he had moreover the great advantage of understanding the subject upon which he wrote.

16 Sir James Mackintosh (Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, p. 208) says of Hutcheson, "To him may also be ascribed that proneness to multiply ultimate and original principles in human nature, which characterized the Scottish school till the second extinction of a passion for metaphysical speculation in Scotland." There is an able view of Hutcheson's philosophy in Cousin, Histoire de la Philosophie, I. série, vol. iv. pp. 31 seq.; written with clearness and eloquence, but perhaps overpraising Hutcheson.

"On its influence, see a letter from Mackintosh to Parr, in Memoirs of Mackintosh, by his Son, vol. i. p. 334. Compare Letters from Warburton to Hurd, pp. 37, 82. 18 Which is added to his Theory of Moral Sentiments, edit. 1822, 2 volumes. Compare a letter which Smith wrote in 1763 on the origin of language (in Nichols's Literary Illustrations of the Eighteenth Century, vol. iii. pp. 515, 516), which exhibits, on a small scale, the same treatment, as distinguished from a generalization of the facts which are supplied by a comprehensive comparison of different languages. Dr. Arnold speaks slightingly of such investigations. He says, "Attempts to explain the phenomena of language a priori seem to me unwise." Arnold's Miscellaneous Works, p. 385. This would lead into a discussion too long for a note: but it appears to me that these a priori inferences are, to the philologist, what hypotheses are to the inductive natural philosopher; and if this be the case, they are extremely important, because no really fruitful experiment ever can be made unless it is preceded by a judicious hypothesis. In the absence of such an hypothesis, men may grope in he dark for centuries, accumulating facts without obtaining knowledge.

19 See, for instance, his attempt to prove, from general reasonings concerning

entirely deductive, since in it Smith generalizes the laws of wealth, not from the phenomena of wealth, nor from statistical statements, but from the phenomena of selfishness; thus making a deductive application of one set of mental principles to the whole set of economical facts.20 The illustrations with which his great book abounds are no part of the real argument: they are subsequent to the conception; and if they were all omitted, the work, though less interesting, and perhaps less influential, would, in a scientific point of view, be equally valuable. To give another instance: the works of Hume, his metaphysical essays alone excepted, are all deductive; his profound economical inquiries are essentially a priori, and might have been written without any acquaintance with those details of trade and finance from which, according to the inductive scheme, they should have been generalized.21 Thus, too, in his Natural History of Religion, he endeavoured simply by reflection, and independently of evidence, to institute a purely speculative investigation into the origin of religious opinions.22 In the same way, in his History the human mind, that there was a necessary relation in regard to the order in which men promulgated the system of concentric spheres and that of eccentric spheres and epicycles. History of Astronomy, in Smith's Philosophical Essays, 1795, 4to, pp. 31, 36, which it may be convenient to compare with Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1847, vol. ii. pp. 53, 60, 61. This striking fragment of Adam Smith's is probably little read now; but it is warmly praised by one of the greatest living philosophers, M. A. Comte, in his Philosophie Positive, vol. vi. p. 319.

20 The two writers who have inquired most carefully into the method which political economists ought to follow, are Mr. John Mill (Essays on Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, 1844, pp. 120-164) and Mr. Rae (New Principles of Polit ical Economy, 1834, pp. 328-351). Mr. Rae, in his ingenious work, objects to Adam Smith that he transgressed the rules of the Baconian philosophy, and thus prevented his inferences from being as valuable as they would have been if he had treated his subject inductively. But Mr. Mill, with great force of reasoning, has proved that the deductive plan is the only one by which political economy can be raised to a science. He says, p. 143, political economy is "essentially an abstract science, and its method is the method a priori;" and at p. 146, that the a posteriori method is "altogether inefficacious." To this I may add, that the modern theory of rent, which is now the corner-stone of political economy, was got at, not by generalizing economical facts, but by reasoning downwards after the manner of geometricians. Indeed, those who oppose the theory of rent, always do so on the ground that it is contradicted by facts; and then, with complete ignorance of the philosophy of method, they infer that therefore the theory is wrong. See, for instance, Jones on the Distribution of Wealth, 8vo, 1831; a book containing some interesting facts, but vitiated by this capital defect of method. See also Journal of Statistical Society, vol. i. p. 317, vol. vi. p. 322; where It is said that economical theories should be generalized from statistical facts. Compare vol. xvii. p. 116, vol. xviii. p. 101.

21 A striking instance has lately come to light of the sagacity with which Hume employed this method. See Burton's Life and Correspondence of Hume, vol. ii. p. 486; where we find, that immediately Hume had read the Wealth of Nations, he detected Smith's error concerning rent being an element of price: so that it now appears that Hume was the first to make this great discovery, as far as the idea is concerned; though Ricardo has the merit of proving it.

The historical facts he introduces are merely illustrations; as any one will see who will read The Natural History of Religion, in Hume's Philos. Works, Edinb. 1826, vol. iv. pp. 435-513. I may mention, that there is a considerable similarity

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