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Updated: May 1, 2025
In Descartes' conception of science, all physical phaenomena were to be explained by matter and motion, that is, not by abstractions but by invariable physical laws: though his own explanations were many of them hypothetical, and turned out to be erroneous.
But the habit being acquired of ascribing not only substantive existence, but real and efficacious agency, to the abstract entities, the consequence was that when belief in the deities declined and faded away, the entities were left standing, and a semblance of explanation of phaenomena, equal to what existed before, was furnished by the entities alone, without referring them to any volitions.
Thirdly, a familiar knowledge of the invariable laws of natural phaenomena is a great elementary lesson of submission, which, he is never weary of saying, is the first condition both of morality and of happiness.
Amiens, Sept. 30, 1794. The domestic politics of France are replete with novelties: the Convention is at war with the Jacobins and the people, even to the most decided aristocrats, have become partizans of the Convention. My last letters have explained the origin of these phaenomena, and I will now add a few words on their progress.
It might have happened that the different classes of phaenomena had depended on laws altogether distinct; that in changing from one to another subject of scientific study, the student left behind all the laws he previously knew, and passed under the dominion of a totally new set of uniformities.
I conceive the proper course to be somewhat as follows. To begin with, let every child be instructed in those general views of the phaenomena of Nature for which we have no exact English name. The nearest approximation to a name for what I mean, which we possess, is "physical geography."
In the concrete external world, the most imposing phaenomena, those of the heavenly bodies, which by their power over the imagination had done most to keep up the whole system of ideas connected with supernatural agency, had been ascertained to take place in so regular an order as to admit of being predicted with a precision which to the notions of those days must have appeared perfect.
Even were man not one of them a member of the same system and subject to the same laws the question of their origin, their causal connexion, that is, with the other phaenomena of the universe, must have attracted his attention, as soon as his intelligence had raised itself above the level of his daily wants.
The truths of Algebra and Geometry nowise depend on these last, and would have been true if these had happened to be the reverse of what we find them: but the phaenomena of equilibrium and motion cannot be understood, nor even stated, without assuming the laws of number and extension, such as they actually are.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said he, "the golden key of mental phaenomena, which has lain buried for ages in the deepest vein of the mine of physiological research, is now, by a happy combination of practical and speculative investigations, grasped, if I may so express myself, firmly and inexcusably, in the hands of physiognomical empiricism."
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