praise of the Creator;” and that all this beautiful system must be referred to “a first cause, which is certainly not mechanical.” 2. We may thus, with the greatest propriety, deny to the mechanical philosophers and mathematicians of recent times any authority with regard to their views of the administration of the universe; we have no reason whatever to expect from their speculations any help, when we attempt to ascend to the first cause and supreme ruler of the universe. But we might perhaps go further, and assert that they are in some respects less likely than men employed in other pursuits, to make any clear advance towards such a subject of speculation. Persons whose thoughts are thus entirely occupied in deduction are apt to forget that this is, after all, only one employment of the reason among more; only one mode of arriving at truth, needing to have its deficiencies completed by another. Deductive reasoners, those who cultivate science, of whatever kind, by means of mathematical and logical processes alone, may acquire an exaggerated feeling of the amount and value of their labours. Such employments, from the clearness of the notions involved in them, the irresistible concatenation of truths which they unfold, the subtlety which they require, and their entire success in that which they attempt, possess a peculiar fascination for the intellect. Those who pursue such studies have generally a contempt and impatience of the pretensions of all those other portions of our knowledge, where from the nature of the case, or the small progress hitherto made in their cultivation, a more vague and loose kind of reasoning seems to be adopted. Now if this feeling be carried so far as to make the reasoner suppose that these mathematical and logical processes can lead him to all the knowledge and all the certainty which we need, it is clearly a delusive feeling. For it is confessed on all hands, that all which mathematics or which logic can do, is to develope and extract those truths, as conclusions, which were in reality involved in the principles on which our reasonings proceeded.[38] And this being allowed, we cannot but ask how we obtain these principles? from what other source of knowledge we derive the original truths which we thus pursue into detail? since it is manifest that such principles cannot be derived from the proper stores of mathematics or logic. These methods can generate no new truth; and all the grounds and elements of the knowledge which, through them, we can acquire, must necessarily come from some extraneous source. It is certain, therefore, that the mathematician and the logician must derive from some process different from their own, the substance and material of all our knowledge, whether physical or metaphysical, physiological or moral. This process, by which we acquire our first principles, (without pretending here to analyse it,) is obviously the general course of human experience, and the