The new philosophy of nature has truths to teach which nature herself
has already been teaching all men, with more or less effect,
miscellaneously, and at odd hours, ever since they were born; and this
philosopher gives a large place in his history, to that vulgar,
practical human wisdom, which all the books till his time had been of
too high a strain to glance at. But 'art is a second nature, and
imitateth that dextrously and compendiously, which nature performs by
ambages and length of time.' The scientific interpreter of nature will
select, and unite, and teach continuously, and pointedly, in grand,
ideal, representative fact, in 'prerogative instances,' that which
nature has but faintly and unconsciously impressed with her method;
for he has a scientific organum, and what is more,--a great deal more,
a thousand times more,--he has the scientific genius that invented it.
His soul is a Novum Organum--his mind is a table of rejections that
sifts the historic masses, and brings out the instances that are to
his purpose, the bright, bold instances that flame forth the doubtful
truth, that tell their own story and need no interpreter, the high
ideal instances that talk in verse because it is their native tongue
and they can no other. He has found,--or rather nature lent it to him,
the universal historic solvent, and the dull, formless, miscellaneous
facts of the common human experience, spring up in magic orders, in
beautiful, transparent, scientific continuities, as they arrange
themselves by the laws of his thinking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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