Posthumous Works Author:Thomas Chalmers 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: CHAPTER II. PRELIMINARY METAPHYSICS AND MENTAL PHYSICS. 1. Metaphysics have been variously defined—as first, the science of the principles and causes of al... more »l things existmg. We conceive Lord Monboddo's description of this science, and which might be accepted for a definition of it, is still more comprehensive—that its province is to consider that ra ovra Tl ovra existences only as existences. It looks to all the things which be, but not in their special properties by which each is distinguished from all others; for on descending to these, we touch on some of the secondary or subordinate sciences. It looks to them in their common property of existence, and considers what is involved in the one universal attribute " to be." Our reason for saying of this view that it is more comprehensive than the first one, is, that it includes properties and relations as well as principles and causes. For example, we might affirm, or at least discuss the question, whether all existent things, in virtue of existence alone, have not a relation to, or do not exist both in space and time, neither of which, let them be viewed either as substantive elements in themselves, or as mere elements of thought, can be regarded as the principle or cause of anything existing. Still metaphysics, so far as yet described, may be reckoned as but the science of entity; and as such it were exclusive of certain topics which never can be discussed without being viewed as metaphysical. For example, neither mathematics nor ethics, when treated abstractly, have to do with things concrete—the one being the science of quantity, and the other, alike without the limits of ontology, whose category is the quid est, being the science of deontology, whose altogether distinct category is the quid oportet. The mathematical relati...« less