as we shall find from the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in
which, deserting his inductive method, he has fallen below himself into
the popular cacoethes, and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the
mysterious powers of numbers, and of the regular solids.

Such a people, when they took to studying physical science, would be,
and in fact were, incapable of Chemistry, Geognosy, Comparative Anatomy,
or any of that noble choir of sister sciences, which are now building up
the material as well as the intellectual glory of Britain.

To Astronomy, on the other hand, the pupils of Euclid turned naturally,
as to the science which required the greatest amount of their favourite
geometry: but even that they were content to let pass from its
inductive to its deductive stage--not as we have done now, after two
centuries of inductive search for the true laws, and their final
discovery by Kepler and Newton: but as soon as Hipparchus had
propounded any theory which would do instead of the true laws, content
there to stop their experiments, and return to their favourite work of
commenting, deducing, spinning notion out of notion, ad infinitum.

Still, they were not all of this temper. Had they been, they would have
discovered, not merely a little, but absolutely nothing. For after all,
if we will consider, induction being the right path to knowledge, every
man, whether he knows it or not, uses induction, more or less, by the
mere fact of his having a human reason, and knowing anything at all; as
M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without being aware of it.

Aristarchus is principally famous for his attempt to discover the
distance of the sun as compared with that of the moon. His method was
ingenious enough, but too rough for success, as it depended principally