Essay on instinct, and its physical and moral relations / By Thomas Hancock.

  • Thomas Hancock
Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essay on instinct, and its physical and moral relations / By Thomas Hancock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    selves to comprehend the acknowledgment of Grotius, one of the most illustrious scholars of his age, and a man of exemplary piety, that “he had consumed much of his life in laboriously doing nothing.”’— We may have dipped so far into philosophy as to be persuaded of this truth, that the greatest attainments in natural knowledge are immeasureably insignificant, when compared with the proper business of life; and unspeakably vain, when inflating the proud mind to search into the counsels of omniscience.—We may have been instructed, also, by the experience of the wisest and best, how little, after all our inquiries, can be known. Yet the advances which have been made in the sciences, strictly so called, viewed abstractedly as evidences of the unassisted powers of Man, of his superiority to the Brute, and his relation to some higher sphere of existence, while they ennoble human genius, urge us to lament its misapplication. But even in the sciences, (where demonstration, as’ in Mathematics, and analysis and synthesis, as in Chemistry, prove the proposition and the law,) we must still come to something which is not revealed,— some link in the chain of natural causes, where the philosophic inquirer must rest, and infer an agency whose mode of working is unknown. When Sir Isaac Newton had discovered that it was by the law of gravitation the planetary motions were to be explained, he doubtless saw it would be a vain speculation to inquire in what manner this gravitating principle or law acted; whether by an electrical Az