s, under the assumptions of two powers, which are themselves
declared to be no more than mere general terms for those quantities
of motion and impact (the atom itself being a fiction formed by
abstraction, and in truth a third occult quality for the purpose of
explaining hardness and density), amounts to an attempt to destroy
chemistry itself, and at the same time to exclude the sole reality
and only positive contents of the very science into which that of
chemistry is to be degraded. Now what qualities are to chemistry,
_productiveness_ is to the science of Life; and this being excluded,
physiology or zoonomy would sink into chemistry, chemistry by the
same process into mechanics, while mechanics themselves would lose
the substantial principle, which, bending the lower extreme towards
its apex, produces the organic circle of the sciences, and elevates
them all into different arcs or stations of the one absolute science
of Life.

This explanation, which in appearance only is a digression, was
indispensably requisite to prevent the idea of polarity, which has
been given as the universal law of Life, from being misunderstood as
a mere refinement on those mechanical systems of physiology, which
it has been my main object to explode.

13 I apprehend that by men of a certain school it would be deemed no
demerit, even though they should never have condescended to look
into any system of Aristotelian logic. It is enough for these
gentlemen that they are experimentalists! Let it not, however, be
supposed that they make more experiments than their neighbours, who
consider induction as a means and not an end; or have stronger
motives for making them, unless it can be believed that Tycho Braehe
must have been urged to repeat his sweeps of the heavens with
greater accuracy and industry than Herschel, for no better reason
than that the former flourished before the theory of gravitation was
perfected. No, but they have the honour of being mere
experimentalists! If, however, we may not refer to logic, we may to
common sense and common experience. It is not improbable, however,
that they have both read and studied a book of hypothetical
psychology on the assumptions of the crudest materialism, stolen too
without acknowledgment from