Amazon.com description: Product Description: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXVII. THE CULTIVATION OP ARCHITECTURE. Tiie cultivation of architecture is made difficult in the outset by the errors and prejudices which surround the subject, and which must be discarded before the mind of the student can be sufficiently receptive of the truths and principles involved. Architecture, as understood at present, cannot be said to rest upon a scientific or logical basis. It is at best but a heterogeneous collection of empirical formulae, which tend to mislead rather than to instruct. Knowledge is derived from phenomena (matter and its motion). We see and hear what is going on around us, and from this sensuous perception we learn. But as matter appears to us in diversified forms, and is subject to equally diversified motions, and as our senses furnish but imperfect means of perception, it is the function of science to classify phenomena with relation to the causes by which they are produced, and to guard the inquiry at every step against errors of sensuous perception. Architecture deals with forms classified chronologically, but not under any system which involves their causes, or the principles upon which they have been developed, or the ideas which they represent. If the student of mechanical engineering were sent into the world to examine machines as he finds them in operation, or depicted in books, with no other guide than the dates of their construction, with directions to select those which seem to him useful, without being informed beforehand of the principles of mechanics, the nature of the lever, the inclined plane, the cog-wheel, the pulley, and the application of these elements of machinery to mechanical work, the result would be that mechanical engineers would select machines to please their own fancy or that of their cli...