Elements of natural philosophy - 1823 Author:John Leslie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: two more will conclude my plan. I intend to annex copious illustrations, containing the more difficult demonstrations, historical notices and references to autho... more »rs, with a correct set of the most useful tables. But I must defer all these additions till the next volume shall appear. College Of Edinburgh,? April 28. 1823. J chapter{Section 4INTRODUCTION. Our curiosity is first awakened by the changes incessantly passing around us. But experience soon testifies the constancy and regularity of this varied spectacle. The vast movements of the Universe are all found to consist merely in a repetition of similar events. It may for ever elude the power of human ingenuity, to discover the more secret springs which unite the links of the wide indissoluble chain. Yet, since the most complex phaenomenon is always the result of a very few principles, the objects of Science are attained by distinguishing and classing these elementary facts. Men will seldom rest satisfied, however, with such moderate advances; and have chapter{Section 5often, in their hasty and rash attempts to penetrate the arcana of Nature, suffered mortification and incurred severe disappointment. The proper business of philosophical inquiry is to study carefully the appearances which successively e- merge, and to trace their mutual relations. All our knowledge of external objects being derived through the medium of the senses, there are only two ways of investigating physical facts, —by Observation or Experiment. Observation is confined to the close investigation and attentive examination of the phaenomena which arise in the course of Nature ; but Experiment consists in a sort of artificial selection and combination of circumstances, for the purpose of searching minutely after the different results. The ran...« less