f the sciences which are thus wanting, and the
importance of the field on which they are employed.

3.

Let us take, for instance, man himself as our object of contemplation;
then at once we shall find we can view him in a variety of relations; and
according to those relations are the sciences of which he is the
subject-matter, and according to our acquaintance with them is our
possession of a true knowledge of him. We may view him in relation to the
material elements of his body, or to his mental constitution, or to his
household and family, or to the community in which he lives, or to the
Being who made him; and in consequence we treat of him respectively as
physiologists, or as moral philosophers, or as writers of economics, or of
politics, or as theologians. When we think of him in all these relations
together, or as the subject at once of all the sciences I have named, then
we may be said to reach unto and rest in the idea of man as an object or
external fact, similar to that which the eye takes of his outward form. On
the other hand, according as we are only physiologists, or only
politicians, or only moralists, so is our idea of man more or less unreal;
we do not take in the whole of him, and the defect is greater or less, in
proportion as the relation is, or is not, important, which is omitted,
whether his relation to God, or to his king, or to his children, or to his
own component parts. And if there be one relation, about which we know
nothing at all except that it exists, then is our knowledge of him,
confessedly and to our own consciousness, deficient and partial, and that,
I repeat, in proportion to the importance of the relation.

That therefore is true of sciences in general which we are apt to think
applies only to pure mathematics, though to pure mathematics it applies
especially, viz., that they cannot be considered as simple representations
or informants of things as they are. We are accustomed to say, and say
truly, that the conclusions of pure mathematics are applied, corrected,
and adapted, by mixed; but so too the conclusions of Anatomy, Chemistry,
Dynamics, and other sciences, are revised and completed by each other.
Those several conclusions do not represent whole and substantive things,
but views, true, so far as they go; and in order to ascertain how far they
do go, that is, how far they correspond to the object to which they
belong, we must compare them with the views taken out of that