asserted; and the systematic form appears to be only accidental to the science; is not the object of science, but merely a means to attain that object.
This may, perhaps, be conceived in the following manner. If we suppose that from some reason or another the human mind can know only very little, and can have of every thing else only opinions, presentiments, or arbitrary meanings ; and if we suppose, moreover, that from some reason or another the human mind can not well rest content with this limited or uncertain knowledge: then the only means of extending and securing that knowledge would be to compare all uncertain knowledge with the certain knowledge, and to draw conclusions from the equality or inequality of both as to the correctness or incorrectness of the former. If an uncertain knowledge were thus discovered to be equal to a certain knowledge, it might be properly assumed to be also certain; but if it were discovered unequal, it would now be definitely known as false, and could no longer deceive. We should be delivered from an error, although we might not have gained positive truth.
I speak plainer. Science is to be one and a whole. The proposition that a pillar erected in a right angle on a horizontal base occupies a perpendicular position, is doubtless a whole, and in so far a science for a person who has no connected knowledge of geometry.
But we also consider the whole geometry, which contains much more than that one proposition, a
