hich the astronomer proposed to himself was, 'How, in accordance with
this law, can the perturbation be produced?' Guided by a principle, he
was enabled to fix the point of space in which, if a mass of matter
were placed, the observed perturbations would follow. We know the
result. The practical astronomer turned his telescope towards the
region which the intellect of the theoretic astronomer had already
explored, and the Planet now named Neptune was found in its predicted
Place. A very respectable outcome, it will be admitted, of an impulse
which 'rests upon no rational grounds, and can be traced to no
rational principle;' which possesses 'no intellectual character;'
which 'philosophy' has uprooted from 'the ground of reason,' and fixed
in that 'large irrational department' discovered for it, by Mr.
Mozley, in the hitherto unexplored wilderness of the human mind.

The proper function of the inductive principle, or the belief in the
order of nature, says Mr. Mozley, is 'to act as a practical basis for
the affairs of life, and the carrying on of human society.' But what,
it may be asked, has the planet Neptune, or the belts of Jupiter, or
the whiteness about the poles of Mars, to do with the affairs of
society? How is society affected by the fact that the sun's
atmosphere contains sodium, or that the nebula of Orion contains
hydrogen gas? Nineteen-twentieths of the force employed in the
exercise of the inductive principle, which, reiterates Mr. Mozley, is
'purely practical,' have been expended upon subjects as unpractical as
these. What practical interest has society in the fact that the spots
on the sun have a decennial period, and that when a magnet is closely
watched for half a century, it is found to perform small motions which
synchronise with the appearance and disappearance of the solar spots?
And yet, I doubt not, Sir Edward Sabine would deem a life of
intellectual toil amply rewarded by being privileged to solve, at its
close, these infinitesimal motions. The inductive principle is
founded in man's desire to know--a desire arising from his position
among phenomena which are reducible to order by his intellect: The
material universe is the complement of the intellect; and, without the
study of its laws, reason could never have awakened to the higher
forms of self-consciousness at all. It is the Non-ego through and by
which the Ego is endowed with self-discernment. We hold it to be an
exercise of reason to