I use the
expression "abuse of better powers," because superior intellects devoted to
philosophical pursuits and experimental sciences have remained strangers to
these saturnalia. The results yielded by an earnest investigation in the
path of experiment can not be at variance with a true philosophy of nature.
If there be any contradiction, the fault must lie either in the unsoundness
of speculation, or in the exaggerated pretensions of empiricism, which
thinks that more is proved by experiment than is actually derivable from it.
External nature may be opposed to the intellectual world, as if the latter
were not comprised within the limits of the former, or nature may be opposed
to art when the latter is defined as a manifestation of the intellectual
power of man; but these contrasts, which we find reflected in the most
cultivated languages, must not lead us to separate the sphere of nature from
that of mind, since such a separation would reduce the physical science of
the world to a mere aggregation of empirical specialities. Science does not
present itself to man until mind conquers matter in striving to subject the
result of experimental investigation to rational combinations. Science is
the labor of mind applied to nature, but the external world has no real
existence for us beyond the image reflected within ourselves through the
medium of the senses.
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