science, Fichte's idea is to some extent illustrated by the
constitution and labours of the British Association. We have here a
body of men engaged in the pursuit of Natural Knowledge, but variously
engaged. While sympathising with each of its departments, and
supplementing his culture by knowledge drawn from all of them, each
student amongst us selects one subject for the exercise of his own
original faculty--one line, along which he may carry the light of his
private intelligence a little way into the darkness by which all
knowledge is surrounded. Thus, the geologist deals with the rocks;
the biologist with the conditions and phenomena of life; the
astronomer with stellar masses and motions; the mathematician with the
relations of space and number; the chemist pursues his atoms; while
the physical investigator has his own large field in optical, thermal,
electrical, acoustical, and other phenomena. The British Association
then, as a whole, faces physical nature on all sides, and pushes
knowledge centrifugally outwards, the sum of its labours constituting
what Fichte might call the sphere of natural knowledge. In the
meetings of the Association it is found necessary to resolve this
sphere into its component parts, which take concrete form under the
respective letters of our Sections.

Mathematics and Physics have been long accustomed to coalesce, and
here they form a single section. No matter how subtle a natural
phenomenon may be, whether we observe it in the region of sense, or
follow it into that of imagination, it is in the long run reducible to
mechanical laws. But the mechanical data once guessed or given,
mathematics are all-powerful as an instrument of deduction. The
command of Geometry over the relations of space, and the far-reaching
power which Analysis confers, are potent both As means of physical
discovery, and of reaping the entire fruits of discovery. Indeed,
without mathematics, expressed or implied, our knowledge of physical
science would be both friable and incomplete.

Side by side with the mathematical method we have the method of
experiment. Here from a starting-point furnished by his own
researches or those of others, the investigator proceeds by combining
intuition and verication. He ponders the knowledge he possesses, and
tries to push it further; he guesses, and checks his guess; he
conjectures, and confirms or explodes his conjecture. These guesses
and conjectures are by no mean