http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/365466153

Dissertations on the history of metaphysical and ethical, and of mathematical and physical science

"When I ventured to undertake the task of contributing a Preliminary Dissertation to the Encyclopædia Britannica, my original intention was, after the example of Jean le Rond D'Alembert, to have begun with a general survey of the various departments of human knowledge. The outline of such a survey, sketched by the comprehensive genius of Francis Bacon, together with the corrections and improvements suggested by his illustrious disciple, would, I thought, have rendered it comparatively easy to adapt their intellectual map to the present advanced state of the sciences; while the unrivalled authority which their united work has long maintained in the republic of letters, would, I flattered myself, have softened those criticisms which might be expected to be incurred by any similar attempt of a more modern hand. On a closer examination, however, of their labours, I found myself under the necessity of abandoning this design. Doubts immediately occurred to me with respect to the justness of their logical views, and soon terminated in a conviction that these views are radically and essentially erroneous. Instead, therefore, of endeavouring to give additional currency to speculations which I conceived to be fundamentally unsound, I resolved to avail myself of the present opportunity to point out their most important defects;--defects which, I am nevertheless very ready to acknowledge, it is much more easy to remark than to supply. The critical strictures which, in the course of this discussion, I shall have occasion to offer on my predecessors, will, at the same time, account for my forbearing to substitute a new map of my own, instead of that to which the names of Bacon and D'Alembert have lent so great and so well-merited a celebrity; and may perhaps suggest a doubt, whether the period be yet arrived for hazarding again, with any reasonable prospect of success, a repetition of their bold experiment. For the length to which these strictures are likely to extend, the only apology I have to offer is the peculiar importance of the questions to which they relate, and the high authority of the writers whose opinions I presume to controvert. It is necessary to comprehend, in one general scheme, all the various departments of study; to arrange them into proper classes; and to point out their mutual relations and dependencies. Such a scheme is sometimes likened by D'Alembert to a map or chart of the intellectual world; sometimes to a Genealogical or Encyclopedical Tree, indicating the manifold and complicated affinities of those studies, which, however apparently remote and unconnected, are all the common offspring of the human understanding. For executing successfully this chart or tree, a philosophical delineation of the natural progress of the mind may (according to D'Alembert) furnish very useful lights"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

Open All Close All