Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

442 REASONING AND DEDUCTIVE EVIDENCE.
and certainty, is that branch of general physics which is now
called mechanical philosophy [or nechanics, simply]; a science
in which the progress of discovery has been astonishingly
rapid, during the course of the last century; and which, in the
systematical concatenation and filiation of its elementary principles, exhibits every day more and more of that logical simplicity and elegance which we admire in the works of the Greek
mathema'ticians. It may> I think, be fairly questioned, whether,
in this department of knowledge, the affectation of mathematical method has not been already carried to an excess; the
essential distinction between mechanical and mathematical
truths being, in many of the physical systems which have lately
appeared on the Continent, studiously kept out of the reader's
view, by exhibiting both, as nearly as possible, in the same
form. A variety of circumstances, indeed, conspire to identify
in the imagination, and, of consequence, to assimilate in the
mode of their statement, these two very different classes of
propositions; but as this assimilation, besides its obvious tendency to involve experimental facts in metaphysical mystery, is
apt occasionally to lead to very erroneous logical conclusions, it
becomes the more necessary, in proportion as it arises from a
natural bias, to point out the causes in which it has originated,
and the limitations with which it ought to be understood.
The following slight remarks will sufficiently explain my
general ideas on this important article of logic.
1. As the study of the mechanical philosophy is, in a great
measure, inaccessible to those who have not received a regular
mathematical education, it commonly happens, that a taste for
it is, in the first instance, grafted on a previous attachment to
the researches of pure or abstract mathematics. Hence a natural and insensible transference to physical pursuits, of mathematical habits of thinking; and hence an almost unavoidable
propensity to give to the former science that systematical connection in all its various conclusions which, from the nature of
its first principles, is essential to the latter, but which can never
belong to any science which has its foundations laid in facts, collected firom experience and observation.