held in that course by an external cause.[1] Kepler least of all had any clear conception of the laws of motion, but held views closely resembling those of Pythagoras. But when we consider that, not reckoning Archimedes, whose teaching was not understood or quickly forgotten, the human mind had for two thousand years not made a step of progress in this matter, we cannot but wonder at the rapidity with which such ideas are now developing; and herein we recognize the influence of that new sense which has been awakened among civilized nations by monotheism. Scarcely had the human mind abandoned the waving sea of speculation, escaped from the mare tenebrosum of scholastic theology, and set its foot on the firm land of inductive investigation, when it triumphantly sped along a track which brought it at one bound, as we might say, up to the highest accessible point; for only fifty years separate Galilei's "Discorsi" from Newton's "Principia," and the formulation by Leibnitz, in the same year 1686, of the doctrine of the conservation of energy.
And so at last with a rapid succession of geographical, astronomical, physical, and chemical discoveries, came the period whose benefits we enjoy, and to which we give the name of the technico-inductive period, because its results are due to the fact that in natural science speculation has given way to induction, the μεθόδος ὲπακτικὴ, of which it is so hard to give an idea to an outsider, because strictly it is nothing else but common-sense applied to a given problem.
The study of this new phase of human history is as full of comfort and encouragement as the study of the mind's enslavement, by the phantasms of its own imagination during the "middle ages," was painful and depressing. Nay, who will deny that, in reviewing the whole history of mankind, with the exception of the golden age of Grecian civilization, which passed away as rapidly as everything beautiful does, no nobler spectacle is to be seen than that which is beginning to unfold itself to our view, and which is even now becoming grander from day to day.
Here we have a universal history very different from the histories which commonly go by that name, and which tell of nothing save the rise and fall of dynasties and empires, treaties and disputed successions, wars and conquests, battles and sieges, rebellions and party strifes, devastation of cities and harassment of populations, murders and executions, court conspiracies and priestly intrigues; which exhibit to us, in the war of all against all, nothing but ambition, avarice, and sensuality, violence, treachery, and revenge, fraud, superstition, and hypocrisy. Only at rare intervals is this dark picture relieved by the cheering apparition of genuine princely magnanimity, or of peace and prosperity among the people, oftener by the soul-stirring deeds of a heroism which, alas! too often is spent in vain. For, whither ultimately leads this
- ↑ Concerning this stage of the mind's development, consult Whewell, "History of the Inductive Sciences," vol. ii., p. 23, et seq.
