See my
'Examen Critique de la Gegraphie du Nouveau Continent, et des Progres de
l'Astronomie Nautique aux 15e et 16e Siecles', t. iv., p. 99-125.
[footnote] II Amp??re, 'Essai sur la Phil. des Sciences', 1834, p. 25.
Whewell, 'Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences', vol. ii., p. 277. Park,
'Pantology', p. 87.
p 59
The selection of an inappropriate Greek nomenclature has perhaps been even
more prejudicial to the last of these attempts than the injudicious use of
binary divisions and the excessive multiplication of groups.
The physical description of the world, considering the universe as an object
of the external senses, does undoubtedly require the aid of general physics
and of descriptive natural history, but thecontemplation of all created
things, which are linked together, and form one 'whole', animated by
internal forces, given to the science we are considering a peculiar
character. Phyical science considers only the general properties of bodies;
it is the product of abstraction -- a generalization of perceptible
phenomena; and even in the work in which were laid the first foundations of
general physics, in the eight books on physics of Aristotle,* all the
phenomena of nature are considered as depending upon the primitive and vital
action of one sole force, from which emaate all the movements of the
universe.
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