ny
science, or family of sciences, to the exclusion of others; they
necessarily become bigots and quacks, scorning all principles and reported
facts which do not belong to their own pursuit, and thinking to effect
everything without aid from any other quarter. Thus, before now, chemistry
has been substituted for medicine; and again, political economy, or
intellectual enlightenment, or the reading of the Scriptures, has been
cried up as a panacea against vice, malevolence, and misery.

4.

Summing up, Gentlemen, what I have said, I lay it down that all knowledge
forms one whole, because its subject-matter is one; for the universe in
its length and breadth is so intimately knit together, that we cannot
separate off portion from portion, and operation from operation, except by
a mental abstraction; and then again, as to its Creator, though He of
course in His own Being is infinitely separate from it, and Theology has
its departments towards which human knowledge has no relations, yet He has
so implicated Himself with it, and taken it into His very bosom, by His
presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His
influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it
without in some main aspects contemplating Him. Next, sciences are the
results of that mental abstraction, which I have spoken of, being the
logical record of this or that aspect of the whole subject-matter of
knowledge. As they all belong to one and the same circle of objects, they
are one and all connected together; as they are but aspects of things,
they are severally incomplete in their relation to the things themselves,
though complete in their own idea and for their own respective purposes;
on both accounts they at once need and subserve each other. And further,
the comprehension of the bearings of one science on another, and the use
of each to each, and the location and limitation and adjustment and due
appreciation of them all, one with another, this belongs, I conceive, to a
sort of science distinct from all of them, and in some sense a science of
sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by Philosophy, in
the true sense of the word, and of a philosophical habit of mind, and
which in these Discourses I shall call by that name. This is what I have
to say about knowledge and philosophical knowledge generally; and now I
proceed to apply it to the particular science, which has led me to draw it
out.

I