destitute of power. It is mentioned as an extraordinary fact of one of the greatest preachers of modern times, Massillon, the Bishop of Meaux, that, in the delivery of his sermon on the Reprobates, his hearers unconsciously half rose from their seats to shake off the horror of thinking that they might possibly be of that number. But Asbury has done even more than this. He has raised his hearers quite off their seats, absorbed with the importance of his theme; an instance of which occurred while he was preaching in Winchester, N. H., in 1810.

4. His Gift of Government. In this he is without a compeer in this country. No man can even pretend to compare with him for a moment. The most of even eminent ministers in the United States have been confined to single congregations. Others have only presided over small and inconsiderable dioceses, containing so few churches as to admit of their being rectors of single parishes at the same time. The labours and influence of none, with but very few exceptions, and these mostly among the Methodists, have extended beyond three or four states. But here is a man who was the pastor of a flock which fed upon a thousand hills,-from the snows of the Canadas, "where summer hurries through the skies," to the sunny South, where roll the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi,-all of whom he held together against a thousand opposing forces, and attached to his person and office, and paternally governing them by moral power alone. Such a spectacle the world has never before seen, not even in the person of Wesley, and probably will not again for many years to come.

5. His Laboriousness. We have seen, in part, what he was as a student, a labourer in the local ranks, while employed also as an humble artisan, as a preacher in charge of a single circuit, as a general assistant of the societies in America, under Mr. Wesley, and afterward as superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church. But let us contemplate him a little more attentively for a few moments. At one time we see him holding a Conference between the waters of the Kennebeck and the Androscoggin, and directing the labours and encouraging the hearts of the small band of hardy itinerants in that distant field. We then see him taking his rapid flight through New-England, preaching as he goes, and anon he is preaching to crowded congregations in the city of NewYork, composed partly of the children and grandchildren of those to whom he had there ministered, in colonial times, forty years before. Again, we see him ministering to devout and enthusiastic multitudes in Baltimore, and stopping for a few days to refresh himself in the society of a select circle of opulent and refined

and pious friends in that hospitable city and its environs. Then we behold him crossing the fords of the broad Potomac, perhaps for the fiftieth time, and hastening down through the piny woods and cotton fields of the distant South to the waters of the Savannah. Presently we behold him scaling the heights of the Blue Ridge and the summits of the Alleghanies, sometimes in company with parties of armed emigrants, sleeping in the woods at night, and descending into the valley of the great West, where the waters flow toward the setting sun, and which is now the fertile and happy home of prosperous millions. Next we discern him, and before the year has rolled its round, beyond the waters of the Niagara and of Lake Ontario, and, in view of the beauty of the country and the fertility of its soil, exclaiming, "Surely this is the land which the Lord hath blessed!" In these extensive tours all the duties of his responsible and important office, great and small, are alike to him, and are equally attended to. At one time we behold him presiding over the deliberations of a Conference, and appointing a hundred men to their several fields of labour; and then preaching to a few poor people gathered in a schoolhouse of an Atlantic state, or in the humble log-cabin of a western settler on the banks of the Ohio; stopping to pray with a poor family far away from churches and the public means of grace, with whom he has taken a frugal repast of "hog and hominy;" and then arresting his course, as he goes to feed thousands, to point some poor African, whom he meets in his journeying in the far South, to "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world." During all this time he also keeps a journal, in which he records the events of the passing moments, and also conducts an important and extensive correspondence. Truly, like the great apostle to the Gentiles, he was "in labours more abundant."

6. Finally, taking him all in all, we have no hesitation in saying that Francis Asbury was the most distinguished and important ecclesiastical character that this country ever saw. Of Washington and his compatriots it might be said, that some of them, in some things, were his superiors. General Greene possessed superior military talents, Wayne possessed a more impetuous courage, Hamilton possessed more brilliant parts, and Lafayette possessed a more ardent and disinterested attachment to the cause of human liberty; but no one of them possessed that peculiar and fortunate combination of all these powers which gave Washington an acknowledged superiority to them all, and pointed him out as the man born to command. So of Francis Asbury. This country has seen men superior to him in many points. Cotton Mather and Thomas Prince were his superiors in learning; Edwards and Dwight were more eminent

theologians, and Gilbert Tennant and President Davies were better pulpit orators; but take him all in all, there is no one of them, nor any one else whom this country has produced, who possessed that peculiar combination of gifts, and endowment of rare qualities, which give this humble Methodist preacher that position among American divines which Saul occupied among his brethren. What Washington is politically in this country, Francis Asbury is ecclesiastically-without a compeer. To God be all the glory. Amen!

ART. VI.--THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDUCTION.

It has long been the fashion to decry the logic of Aristotle, because, its legitimate use not being understood in the mediæval schools, it served to divert the minds of men from the study of nature, and set them whirling about in dialectic circles to educe the principles of science and the laws of the universe; and Bacon and Des Cartes. have been lauded to the skies, because they taught that Nature reveals her laws only in the passing phenomena of matter and mind, as presented to the senses and the consciousness, which must be carefully analyzed and then generalized by the process of induction. A comparison has been made between the organon of Aristotle and the organon of Bacon,-or, to speak more precisely, between the method of deduction and of induction,-altogether to the disparagement of the former, until at length it has come to pass that it is no longer regarded by many as of vital importance to scientific investigation, while induction is considered as not merely an indispensable auxiliary to the discovery of new truths and principles, but as the only fundamental process of inference--the only process by which, from facts perceived by the intelligence, you can advance to the determination of the laws and principles which are the objects of science.

It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the exaltation of induction, since Bacon directed the attention of philosophers to it, no thorough attempts were made to expound its philosophy, and to institute. its canons until very recently. Dr. Whewell, Mr. John Stuart Mill, Dr. Henry Tappan, and M. Comte have supplied the desideratum by works profoundly investigating the whole subject of logic, and particularly induction. We have, therefore, the means by which we may sit in judgment upon the question, and render an enlightened verdict.

The particular aspect of the question, which it is the design of

this paper to examine, is clearly presented in the following remarks in Cousin's critique of the philosophy of Locke. Cousin wonders, as well he may, that a leader in the sensual and Baconian school of philosophy should so far be warped from his appropriate sphere of thought, as to lose sight altogether of induction as one of the legitimate modes of knowledge, while, at the same time, casting contempt upon the syllogism as the proper type of the reasoning process!

"Thus intuition and demonstration are the different modes of knowledge, according to Locke. But are there no others? Have we not knowledge which we acquire neither by intuition nor demonstration? How do we acquire a knowledge of the laws of external nature? Take which you please, gravitation for instance. Certainly there is no simple intuition and immediate evidence here, for experiments multiplied and combined are necessary to give the slightest law; and even this will not suffice, since the slightest surpasses the number, whatever it be, of experiments from which it is drawn. There is need, therefore, of an intervention of some other operation of mind besides intuition. Is it demonstration? Impossible, for demonstration is the perception of the relation between two ideas by means of a third; but it is upon the condition that the latter should be more general than the two others, in order to embrace and connect them. To demonstrate is, in the last analysis, to deduce the particular from the general. Now, what is the more general physical law from which gravitation can be deduced? We have not deduced the knowledge of gravitation from any other knowledge anterior to it, and which involves it in the germ. How, then, have we acquired this knowledge, which we certainly have? and, in general, how do we acquire the knowledge of physical laws? A phenomenon having been presented a number of times, with a particular character and in particular circumstances, we have judged that if this same phenomenon should occur in similar circumstances, it would have the same character; that is to say, we have generalized the particular character of this phenomenon. Instead of descending from the general to the particular, we have ascended from the particular to the general. This general character is what we call a law: this law we have not deduced from a more general law or character; we have derived it from particular experiments, in order to transfer it beyond them. It is not simple resumption, nor a logical deduction; it is what we call induction. It is to induction that we owe all conquests over nature, all our discoveries of the laws of the world."

This clear and eloquent exposition of the order of thought in the two processes of deduction and induction, as it has commonly been apprehended, enables us to present, without danger of being misunderstood, the problem which we wish to solve, viz., that there is no fundamental difference between induction and deduction; but in both cases the mind proceeds from the more general to the less general, or from the general to the particular; and that the opposite process of proceeding from the particular to the general is utterly impossible. All inference, I maintain, is of one kind-it is deductive. You may take as many particulars as you can gather together, and they will be perfectly barren of any consequence, unless you can attach them to a general principle. You may sum them up, and call it generalization; but you can never infer a universal law, you can

make no scientific generalization by means of them, unless you can put them upon some broader general principle than that which you wish to educe from them. Take the instance of scientific induction referred to by Cousin, that of the law of gravitation, and analyze it thoroughly, and you will see that it is at bottom deduction. A philosopher observes a material substance-a body-say, an apple, fall to the ground; he observes another body, a leaf, in like manner disengaging itself from the tree and following the apple; he casts a stone into the air, it takes the same direction; he casts a feather upon the winds, and, though for a time it is resisted by the currents of air, yet, when these obstacles cease, it directly in like manner falls to the earth. From these particulars, he observes that it is the material substance in these different bodies that exhibits the phenomenon of falling to the earth, and not any particular quality of the apple, or the leaf, or the stone, or the feather-and this is his analysis. Thereupon he proceeds to infer that all bodies-all material substances-in all parts of the globe will behave in like manner; in other words, he infers the law of terrestrial gravity. This is his induction. He seems, indeed, merely to proceed from the particular to the general; but how? by what authority? on what ground? To answer this question is to solve the problem of inference.

Dr. Whewell, who has elaborated this point, says that the conclusion is not a mere summing up of these particulars, and of all known particulars of the same nature; it is something more—a conception, which, while it expresses these particulars, transcends them-it reaches all possible cases of the same kind. But how do we get this conception? He says we leap to it: "Induction mounts the ladder by a leap, which is out of the reach of method." then, it can turn round and verify itself by descending the ladder, step by step, by the deductive process. But how do we make the leap? By a sort of philosophical "sagacity-a scientific instinct," which is the rare gift of some superior minds. But this explains nothing.

But,

Now, if this inference of the general law from observed particulars be a legitimate procedure, and it cannot admit of any solution, then it must be regarded as ultimate, and we may call it induction, and mark it as the opposite of deduction. But it happens that we can analyze the process in this instance and in all instances of induction, and this analysis will show that the subtle movement of the reasoning faculty from the particulars to the general is upon the broad basis of a universal and intuitive principle, and thus the whole process could easily be put into the form of a syllogism, with the principle for its major premiss, and these observed particulars for its minor premiss.