and will? If it be, why have so few the power, even among men of power,
and they so seldom? If brain alone were what was wanted, what could not
Aristotle have discovered? Or is it that no man can see a thing unless
God shows it him? Is it that in each separate act of induction, that
mysterious and transcendental process which cannot, let logicians try as
they will, be expressed by any merely logical formula, Aristotelian or
other--is it I say, that in each separate act of induction we do not
find the law, but the law is shown to us, by Him who made the law?
Bacon thought so. Of that you may find clear proof in his writings.
May not Bacon be right? May it not be true that God does in science, as
well as in ethics, hide things from the wise and prudent, from the
proud, complete, self-contained systematiser like Aristotle, who must
needs explain all things in heaven and earth by his own formulae, and
his entelechies and energies, and the rest of the notions which he has
made for himself out of his own brain, and then pack each thing away in
its proper niche in his great cloud-universe of conceptions? Is it that
God hides things from such men many a time, and reveals them to babes,
to gentle, affectionate, simple-hearted men, such as we know Archimedes
to have been, who do not try to give an explanation for a fact, but feel
how awful and divine it is, and wrestle reverently and stedfastly with
it, as Jacob with the Angel, and will not let it go, until it bless
them? Sure I am, from what I have seen of scientific men, that there is
an intimate connection between the health of the moral faculties and the
health of the inductive ones; and that the proud, self-conceited, and
passionate man will see nothing: perhaps because nothing will be shown
him.

But we must leave Archimedes for a man not perhaps so well known, but to
whom we owe as much as to the great Syracusan--Hipparchus the
astronomer. To his case much which I have just said applies. In him