EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

The Baconian precept, to "torture Nature out of her secrets," has been, and ever must be, abortive of the good intended. Nature is performing freely and openly every hour, without making us wiser, and as little while she is operating in our own experiments. Her language, of which inertia and pressure are the alpha and omega, is not studied; nor does it mislead or flatter like our own. Experiments innumerable have been performed; the experimentum crucis resorted to; the screw applied to the utmost pinch, without either confession or concealment on Nature's part. Hence, the experimenter is left to make his own philosophy of the case, of which the next operator makes a different; and all are falsely interpreted that violate the principle of inertia, which all do. Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Black, Reid, Davy, Des Cartes, experimented indefatigably under the most favourable auspices,—exalted talent, and the institutions of the world at command; but all on false principles; yet Nature, tortured or not, left them to their own mis-interpretations. Aristotle, true in his opinion of motion, was himself ignorant of the cause of continuous motion, or all would not be so at present. Bacon recommended experiment, without teaching the natural mode of interpretation. Newton spent his valuable time, to the world's great loss, in experimenting on light, in ascertaining and describing its properties, as if there were material light; instead of which, light is a mere sensible effect; hence, a physical nonentity. Black and Reid called to their assistance all the powers of numbers, to ascertain and prove the quantity of heat in the animal system, and of cold in ice; but could not torture Nature out of the information, that heat and cold do not belong to matter or bodies, as a knowledge of the function of the senses could have informed them. Davy travelled to Skehallean to find from the size of the hill, a ratio of attraction, whence to calculate the quantity of attraction in the entire globe of the earth: at home, correctly sought, he would have found, without numerical assistance and the pendulum, that the amount is zero. The deflection of the pendulum was caused by the pressure on one side of the bulb being greater than on the side facing the hill; which, from varying hourly with the sun's altitude, should have told him that the deflection is a mere weather-deviating circumstance.

On the other hand, who perceives the natural truths elicited by even his own experiments! That truly great philosopher, Priestly, remained ignorant that his own experiments on blood and air brought to light the principle on which the blood is arterialized, without coming in contact with the air in the lungs; of which experiments the faculty are reprehensibly ignorant at present; also the principle of congelation without cold. It is a general error that men must be philosophers because they are mathematicians and first-rate experimenters, yet do not know what keeps the blood in motion, nor how water becomes ice.

What experiment was ever so absurdly illustrated as that of ice formed in the midst of fire; which is explained by, "evaporation generating cold in a red-hot crucible," and while maintaining that cold is only the absence of heat. The rationale is: the oxygen of water is the hindrance to congelation, which the evaporation carries off, and the remaining elements of the water are compressed into ice. What are the elementary constituents of water, has yet to be learned. Misled by false-directing philosophy, the analysis of a rotten potato, in quest of the cause of the vegetable epidemic, is as wise as were the same scientific procedure taken on the contents of a pustule to discover the cause of the small pox: the result in both cases must be a complete new formation; and in the former, the result could be no preventive information whatever to the planter. To convince planters and remove all timidity, every garden owner should plant an experimental patch with potato peelings, each having an eye; the crop is certain and good, and supplies the cottager with the next year's seed at no expense. The cutting for seed may be of exhausted vegetating power, while the peeling of even the same potato may be as sound as ever. The badly grown potatoes of the previous crop caused those of the following to be of imperfect growth and perishable: hence the general potato-rot.

PHYSIOLOGY AND FUNCTION OF THE SENSES.

By the popular expression, "Evidence of the Senses," is universally understood, the perception, or seeing external bodies by the organs of sense: yet externals are invisible and the senses insentient. This mistake, common among the fathers of every age, has corrupted the prevalent false philosophy tenfold.

The eye is not possessed of sight; neither is colour a property of matter, or it must be indestructible by fire and every other means. The senses should be considered as but mechanical agents for exciting the brain; by which means it is we have our knowledge, the particulars of the whole of which are mental, confined to the brain, and consist, solely, in the cerebral excited scenery of the sensorium. We have no other kind or means of acquiring knowledge, that is, mental information. By the mere organs of sense we know nothing. The knowledge we have by means of the senses exciting the brain, consists in sensations or sensible effects, and, we know nothing but our knowledge, whatever may be thought of externals being objects and immediate objects of our knowledge.

In describing what we know, it is imagined the description is of external bodies, their appearance, qualities, and properties; which, however harmless the mistake throughout busy-life affairs,—as all abide, judge, and are directed by the same kind of evidence,—not so is it in philosophy, which is a description of nature's own mode of procedure; and although it is impossible to describe invisible things, as they are really, they should not be philosophised and reasoned on, as they are not; they are not according to what we know, and can have no resemblance in any manner to sensations, which are all we know by means of them. Instead of knowing by the senses what bodies are, we know only what they are not; modern philosophy is regardless, totally heedless of this most instructive most pointedly directing information, instead of making the just allowance for mental appearances, it materializes every sensation, and imputes the whole to the bodies outside of our own, of which all we can possibly know is but inferential knowledge: it considers our sensations as being qualities of bodies or properties of matter, and maintains that some are physical causes by which certain physical effects are produced. Such may be considered some of the principal reasons why clairvoyance is unintelligible to all the most learned; and so must it ever remain, or until a truer philosophy arises and rescues the great subject from the darkness and errors of a perverting philosophy, the whole of which has to be abandoned before the mind is fitted for the reception of natural truths. We must cease to identify sensations with their unseen, unknown, and but promoting, material causes. In proof of the foregoing, a short review of the senses, their physiology, function, result of the function and use of the result, must prove satisfactory and convincing.

The physiology of a sense, consists in an