SCIENCE, in Philosophy, denotes any doctrines deduced from self-evident principles.
Sciences may be properly divided as follows: 1. The knowledge of things, their constitutions, properties, and operations: this, in a little more enlarged sense of the word, may be called physics, or natural philosophy; the end of which is speculative truth. See PHILOSOPHY and PHYSICS.—2. The skill of rightly applying these powers, praxis: The most considerable under this head is ethics, which is the seeking out those rules and measures of human actions that lead to happiness, and the means to practise them (see MORAL PHILOSOPHY); and the next is mechanics, or the application of the powers of natural agents to the uses of life (see MECHANICS).—3. The doctrine of signs, significatio; the most usual of which being words, it is aptly enough termed logic. See LOGIC.
This, says Mr Locke, seems to be the most general, as well as natural, division of the objects of our understanding. For a man can employ his thoughts about nothing but either the contemplation of things themselves for the discovery of truth; or about the things in his own power, which are his actions, for the attainment of his own ends; or the signs the mind makes use of both in the one and the other, and the right ordering of these for its clearer information. All which three, viz. things as they are in themselves knowable, actions as they depend on us in order to happiness, and the right use of signs in order to knowledge, being toto casu different, they seem to be the three great provinces of the intellectual world, wholly separate and distinct one from another.
A DESIRE of amusement and relaxation is natural to man. The mind is soon fatigued with contemplating the most sublime truths, or the most refined speculations, while these are addressed only to the understanding. In philosophy, as in polite literature, we must, to please and secure attention, sometimes address ourselves to the imagination or to the passions, and thus combine the agreeable with the useful. For want of this combination, we find that pure mathematics (comprehending arithmetic, geometry, algebra, fluxions, &c.), notwithstanding their great and acknowledged utility, are studied but by few; while the more attractive sciences of experimental philosophy and chemistry, are almost universally admired, and seldom fail to draw crowds of hearers or spectators to the lectures of their professors. The numerous striking phenomena which these latter sciences present to our senses, the splendid experiments by which their principles may be illustrated, and the continual application which they admit, of those principles and experiments to the affairs of common life, have a powerful influence on the imagination; fix and keep alive the attention; excite the passions of joy, terror, or surprise, and gratify that love of the marvellous which nature has implanted in the human mind. Even the more abstruse subjects of pure mathematics,
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especially arithmetic and geometry, may be sometimes enlivened by amusing examples and contrivances; and are found the more pleasing, in proportion as they are susceptible of such elucidation.
These experimental contrivances, and useful applications to the purposes of common life, constitute what we may term the Amusements or Recreations of SCIENCE. They have very properly been denominated rational recreations, as they serve to relax and unbend the mind after long attention to the cares of business, or to severer studies, in a manner more rational, and often more satisfactory, than those frivolous pursuits which too often employ the time, and injure the health of the rising generation.
In the preceding volumes of this work we have supplied our readers with many examples of scientific recreation. Thus, the articles LEGERDEMAIN and PROTECHNY may be regarded as entirely of this nature; and in the experimental parts of CHEMISTRY, ELECTRICITY, GALVANISM, and MAGNETISM; in the articles ACOUSTICS, HYDRODYNAMICS, MECHANICS, OPTICS, and its correlative divisions, CATOPTRICS, DIOPTRICS, PERSPECTIVE, and MICROSCOPE; in PNEUMATICS and AEROSTATION, we have related a variety of interesting experiments, and described many ingeni-