ABERCROMBIE’S definition of the object of science was dictated by a deep consciousness of the supernatural origin of nature, and it has served to discredit him with some later writers who hold that the supernatural is “unknowable.” His essays on the “Intellectual Powers,” on the “Philosophy of the Moral Feelings,” and allied topics have not been discredited with the general public, however, by the change of scientific terminology, and it is by no means certain that any later writer—not even Mr. Spencer himself—has succeeded in putting into intelligible and accurate English so many well-defined ideas of fundamental importance as guided Abercrombie in the composition of such essays as that on the “General Nature and Objects of Science” with which he introduced his essays on the “Intellectual Powers.”

  He differs from some later writers on similar topics because of his recognition of law in nature as a tendency resulting from an infinite power of improvement imposed on nature rather than as a necessary and inherent quality of matter itself. To him nature presented a harmony of forces working to produce results tending to a more nearly perfect harmony. It is said that in his religious life he was “unaffectedly pious,” but this involved him in no contradiction when, writing before Professor Huxley, he stated the scientific principle of Huxley’s “agnosticism.” That final causes are beyond the reach of chemical analysis and that they are never to be reached by microscopic investigation, he insists in his analysis of the powers of the intellect. But he recognized this as a mere matter of definition,—an implication of the word “knowledge” itself as it implies the results of experience and as it is distinct in meaning from “consciousness.” Professor Max Müller in his “Science of Thought” expresses the same idea by quoting:

  Intellect to Abercrombie is a mere mode of operation,—a method by which the human soul takes hold on the transitory phenomena of a natural order in which a Supreme Will is eternally operating to produce infinite improvement. It is said by his critics that he does not show “marked originality” in such ideas and it is in the nature of things impossible that he should. They are as old as the Chaldean science which expresses itself through the metaphors of the Book of Job. They belong to all poets and creative thinkers from Homer to Goethe. Aristotle appropriated them as the foundation principles of his school, and they are no less the foundations of the “Novum Organum” when, with the premise that “the beginning is from God,” Bacon declares that “the induction which is to be available for the discovery of science and arts must analyze nature by proper rejections and exclusions … not only to discover axioms, but also in the formation of notions; and it is in this induction that our chief hope lies.”

  This observation of all possible operations of nature as part of a Supreme Law not governed by the qualities of matter, but operating harmoniously through them, Bacon proposed as the reasonable mode through which alone the scientific intelligence can act. Certainly there is nothing of novelty in Abercrombie, writing after him. If novelty or originality be possible in thought, it is by no means established that it is desirable, and the question which is finally to determine the merits of any thinker is not “Is he original?” but “Is he right?” Tried by that test Abercrombie is perhaps as little apt to be discredited as any later writer on the subjects which occupied his attention.

  He was born in 1780 at Aberdeen, Scotland, and educated in medicine at its university and in London. For a long time he held the first rank among the physicians and scientific writers of Scotland. His “Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers of Man” was published in 1830 and three years later he followed it with “The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings.” In 1835 he became Lord Rector of Marischal College at Aberdeen, and, until his death in 1844, Scotland honored him as one of its greatest thinkers. His essays have passed through many editions, and still retain a popularity due to their ease of style and the lucidity of the language in which they express ideas which some writers on similar topics succeed in making incomprehensible.