most illustrious Newtonians have declared no otherwise comprehensible
than as an immediate spiritual influence, there remains nothing but
its law, the execution of which on a vast scale is the mechanism of
the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would then be
completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in
essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as
intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth
shall declare not only the power of their maker, but the glory and the
presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during
the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity.
This may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences
with the material phaenomenon as the reality and substance of things
existing, does yet by the necessity of theorizing unconsciously, and
as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this
tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the
one of the two poles of fundamental science.
2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THE PROBLEM THEN IS, HOW
THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A COINCIDENT OBJECTIVE.
In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends on an
austere and faithful adherence to its own principles, with a careful
separation and exclusion of those, which appertain to the opposite
science. As the natural philosopher, who directs his views to the
objective, avoids above all things the intermixture of the subjective
in his knowledge, as for instance, arbitrary suppositions or rather
suflictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents, and the substitution of
final for efficient causes; so on the other hand, the transcendental
or intelligential philosopher is equally anxious to preclude all
interpellation of the objective into the subjective principles of his
science, as for instance the assumption of impresses or configurations
in the brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on the retina painted
by rays of light from supposed originals, which are not the immediate
and real objects of vision, but deductions from it for the purposes of
explanation. This purification of the mind is effected by an absolute
and scientific scepticism, to which the mind voluntarily determines
itself for the specific purpose of future certainty. Des Cartes who
(in his meditations) himself first, at least of the moderns, gave
a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined
indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the
scepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in Scepticos imitabar,
qui dubitant tantum ut dubitent, et praeter incertitudinem ipsam nihil
quaerunt. Nam contra totus in eo eram ut aliquid certi reperirem [51].
Nor is it less distinct in its motives and final aim, than in its proper
objects, which are not as in ordinary scepticism the prejudices of
education and circumstance, but those original and innate prejudices
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