adopted a
wrong method. Instead of beginning with observation, and carefully
dissecting the world which God has made, so as to rise, by a clear
analysis of _things_, to the general principles on which they have been
actually framed and put together, they have set out from the lofty region
of universal abstractions, and proceeded to reconstruct the world for
themselves. Instead of beginning with the actual, as best befits the
feebleness of the human intellect, and working their way up into the great
system of things, they have taken their position at once in the high and
boundless realm of the ideal, and thence endeavoured to deduce the nature
of the laws and phenomena of the real world. This is the course pursued by
Plato, Leibnitz, Hobbes, Descartes, Edwards, and, indeed, most of those
great thinkers who have endeavoured to shed light on the problem in
question. Hence each has necessarily become "a sublime architect of
words," whose grand and imposing system of shadows and abstractions has
but a slight foundation in the real constitution and laws of the spiritual
world. Their writings furnish the most striking illustration of the
profound aphorism of Bacon, that "the usual method of discovery and proof,
by first establishing the most general propositions, then applying and
proving the intermediate axioms according to these, is the _parent of
error and the calamity of every science_." He who would frame a real model
of the world in the understanding, such as it is found to be, not such as
man's reason has distorted, must pursue the opposite course. Surely it
cannot be deemed unreasonable, that this course should be most diligently
applied to the study of the intellectual world; especially as it has
wrought such wonders in the province of natural knowledge, and that too,
after so many ages had, according to the former method, laboured upon it
comparatively in vain. Because the human mind has not been able to bridge
over the impassable gulf between the ideal and the concrete, so as to
effect a passage from the former to the latter, it certainly does not
follow, that it should forever despair of so far penetrating the apparent
obscurity and confusion of real things, as to see that nothing which God
has created is inconsistent with the eternal, immutable glory of the
ideal: or, in other words, because the real world and the ideal cannot be
shown to be connected by a logical dependency, it does not follow, that
the actual cre