The person whose mind is employed in reducing to law and order and intelligible cause the complex facts of the material world, is compelled to look beyond the present state of his knowledge, and to turn his thoughts to the existence of principles higher than those which he yet possesses. He has seen occasions when facts that at first seemed incoherent and anomalous, were reduced to rule and connexion; and when limited rules were discovered to be included in some rule of superior generality. He knows that all facts and appearances, all partial laws, however confused and casual they at present seem, must still, in reality, have this same kind of bearing and dependence;--must be bound together by some undiscovered principle of order;--must proceed from some cause working by most steady rules;--must be included in some wide and fruitful general truth. He cannot therefore consider any principles which he has already obtained, as the ultimate and sufficient reason of that which he sees. There must be some higher principle, some ulterior reason. The effort and struggle by which he endeavours to extend his view, makes him feel that there is a region of truth not included in his present physical knowledge; the very imperfection of the light in which he works his way, suggests to him that there must be a source of clearer illumination at a distance from him. We must allow that it is scarcely possible to describe in a manner free from some vagueness and obscurity, the effect thus produced upon the mind by the efforts which it makes to reduce natural phenomena to general laws. But we trust it will still be allowed that there is no difficulty in seeing clearly that a different influence may result from this process, and from the process of deductive reasoning which forms the main employment of the mathematical cultivators and systematic expositors of physical science in modern times. Such persons are not led by their pursuits to any thing beyond the general principles, which form the basis of their explanations and applications. They acquiesce in these; they make these their ultimate grounds of truth; and they are entirely employed in unfolding the particular truths which are involved in the general truth. Their thoughts dwell little upon the possibility of the laws of nature being other than we find them to be, or on the reasons why they are not so; and still less on those facts and phenomena which philosophers have not yet reduced to any rule; which are lawless to us, though we know that, in reality, they are governed by some principle of order and harmony. On the contrary, by assuming perpetually the existing laws as the basis of their reasoning, without question or doubt, and by employing such language that these laws can be expressed in the simplest and briefest form, they are led to think and believe as if these laws were necessarily and inevitably what they are. Some mathematicians indeed have maintained that the highest laws of