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where no apparent agreement exists. This it is which sets the inquirer at work, quickens his thoughts, and leads him to new observations and experiments. An idea of a supersensible thing termed force, is present to the mind. For this force in its very diverse forms, as mechanical action, heat, electric action, chemical action, it strives to find a measure, and so to establish an equation between these different expressions by virtue of this their common term. Fruitful as this inquiry has been in science, it turns on an interpretation of things quite inscrutable to the senses.

But how vain is it to demand positive, direct knowledge through the senses of this notion itself, so serviceable and indispensable? If we are to banish, as the ghosts of past superstitions, all the disembodied ideas the mind furnishes to positive science, we shall shortly be left without guidance, deserted of these good angels of thought, in whose absence eyes and ears are of no avail. We are in science, no less than in philosophy, constantly reaching and handling supersensual notions, purely mental phenomena; we are ever making them most fruitful sources of further acquisitions, though certainly with no more full, definite, and positive knowledge of their very nature than that we possess of mental phenomena from consciousness. Indeed, the moment we, penetrate a very little below the surface, Positive Philosophy is of the same nature with that which it discards, is dealing with causes, forces, and reasons which are wholly the offspring of the mind, and the limits of whose legitimate use must be determined on purely intellectual grounds.

Nor is philosophy itself without its fixed, settled facts, as generally admitted and as incontrovertible as those of any science whatever. The laws of recollection, attention, judgment, imagination, of the emotions, of responsibility, constitute a large department of accepted conclusions.