joicing, gazing on the bewildering basketfuls that are pouring in, they cry, answering after so long a time, for their part Pilate's question: This, so far as it goes at least, this is truth. And the rod of that enchantment was plucked here. It is but a branch from this same trunk this trunk of 'universality,' which the men of practice will scorn no more, when once they reach the multitudinous boughs of this great tree of miracles, where the nobler fruits, the more chosen fruits of the new science, are hidden still. Continued from that trunk,' heavy with its juices, stoops now this branch; its golden hangings' mellowed, — time mellowed, -ready to fall unshaken. Built on that foundation,' rises now this fair structure, the doctrine of the state. That knowledge of nature in general, that interior knowledge of her, that loving insight, which is not baffled with her most foreign aspects; but detects her, and speaks her word, as from within, in all, is that which meets us here, that which meets us at the threshold. Our guide is veiled, but his raiment is priestly. It is great nature's stole that he wears; he will alter our-Persian. We are walking on the pavements of Art; but it is Nature's temple still; it is her ' pyramid,' and we are within, and the light from the apex is kindling all; and the dust 'that the rude wind blows in our face,' and 'the poor beetle that we tread on,' and the poor 'madman and beggar too,' are glorious in it, and of our 'kin.' Those universal forms which the book of science in the abstract has laid bare already, are running through all; the cord of them is visible in all the detail, Their foot-prints, which have been tracked to the height where nature is one, are seen for the first time cleared, uncovered here, in all the difference. This many-voiced speech, that sounds so deep from every point, deep as from the heart of nature, is not the ventriloquist's artifice, is not a poor showman's trick. It is great nature's voice - her own; and the magician who has untied her spell, who knows the cipher of 'the one in all' the priest who has unlocked her inmost shrine, and plucked out the heart of her mystery — is the Interpreter.' CHAPTER IX. THE CURE-PLAN OF INNOVATION-NEW DEFINITIONS. IT 'Swear by thy double self And that's an oath of credit.' 'Having thus far proceeded That I did amplify my judgment in Other conclusions?' T is the trunk of the prima philosophia then which puts forth these new and wondrous boughs, into all the fields of human speculation and practice, filling all our outdoor, penetrating all our indoor life, with their beauty and fragrance; overhanging every roof, stooping to every door, with their rich curtains and clusters of ornament and delight, with their ripe underhanging clusters of axioms of practice - brought down to particulars, ready for use with their dispersed directions overhanging every path, with their aphorisms made out of the pith and heart of sciences, representing a broken knowledge, and, therefore, inviting the men of speculation to inquire farther.' - เ It is from this trunk of a scientific universality, of a useful, practical, always-at-hand, all-inclusive, historical universality, to which the tracking of the principles, operant in history, to their simple forms and 'causes in nature,' conducts the scientific experimenter, it is from this primal living trunk and heart of sciences, to which the new method of learning conducts us, that this great branch of scientific practice comes, which this drama with its 'transitory shows' has brought safely down to us;—this two-fold branch of ethics and politics, which come to us-conjoined-as ethics and politics came in other systems then not scientific,- making in their junction, and through all their divergencies, the forbidden questions of science. The science of this essentially conjoined doctrine is that which makes, in this case, the novelty. The nature which is formed in everything,' and not in man only, and the faculty, in man, of comprehending that wider nature, is that which makes the higher ground, from which a science of his own specific nature, and the explanation of its phenomenon, is possible to man. Except from this height of a common nature, there is no such thing as a scientific explanation of these phenomena possible. And this explanation is what the specific nature in man, with its speculative grasp of a larger whole—with its speculative grasp of a universal whole, with its instinctive moral reach and comprehension corresponding to that,-constitutionally demands and anticipates.' And the knowledge of this nature which is formed in everything, and not in man only, is the beginning, not of a speculative science of the human nature merely, it is the beginning, it is the indispensable foundation of the arts in which a successful artistic advancement of that nature, or an artistic cure or culture of it is propounded. The fact that the 'human nature' is, indeed, what it is called, a 'nature,' the fact that the human species is a species, the fact that the human kind is but a kind, neighboured with many others from which it is isolated by its native walls of ignorance,-neighboured with many others, more or less known, known and unknown, more or less kind-ly, more or less hostile,- species, kinds, whose dialects of the universal laws, man has not found,- the fact that the universal, historic principles are operant in all the specific modifications of human nature, and control and determine them, the fact that the human life admits of a scientific analysis, and that its phenomena require to be traced to their true forms, this is the fact which is the key to the new philosophy, the key which unlocks it, the key to the part speculative, and the part operative of it. And this is the secret of the difference between this philo 6 sophy and all other systems and theories of man's life on earth that had been before it, or that have come after it. For this new and so solid height of natural philosophy,— solid,-historical,-from its base in the divergency of natural history, to its utmost peak of unity,- this scientific height of a common nature, whose summit is prima philosophia,' with its new universal terms and axioms,- this height from which man, as a species, is also overlooked, and his spontaneous notions and theories criticised, subjected to that same criticism with which history itself is always flying in the face of them, from which the specific bias in them is everywhere detected, this new 'pyramid' of knowledge is the one on whose rock-hewn terraces the conflict of views, the clash of man's opinions shall not sound: this is the system which has had, and shall have, no rival. And this is the key to this philosophy, not where it touches human nature only, but everywhere where it substitutes for abstract human notions-specific human notions that are powerless in the arts, or narrow observations that are restrained and uncertain in the rules of practice they produce,-powers, true forms, original agencies in nature, universal powers, sure as nature herself, and her universal form. To abase the specific human arrogance, to overthrow the idols of the tribe,' is the ultimate condition of this learning. Man as man, is not a primal, if he be an ultimate, fact in nature. Nature is elder and greater than he, and requires him to learn of her, and makes little of his mere conceits and dogmas. - From the height of that new simplicity which this philosophy has gained - not as the elder philosophies had gained theirs, by pure contemplation, by hasty abstraction and retreat to the à priori sources of knowledge and belief in man,which it has gained, too, by a wider induction than the facts of the human nature can supply with the torch of these universal principles cleared of their historic complexities, with the torch of the nature that is formed in everything, it enters here this great, unenclosed field of human life and practice, this Spenserian wilderness, where those old, gnarled trunks, and tangled boughs, and wretched undergrowths of centuries, stop the way, where those old monsters, which the action of this play exposes, which this philosophy is bound to drag out to the day, are hid. The radical universal fact-the radical universal distinction of the double nature of GOOD which is formed in everything, and not in man only, and the two universal motions which correspond to that, the one, as everything, is a total or substantive in itself, with its corresponding motion; for this is the principle of selfishness and war in nature-the principle which struggles everywhere towards decay and the dissolution of the larger wholes, and not in man only, though the foolish, unscientific man, who does not know how to track the phenomena of his own nature to their causes, who has no bridge from the natural internal phenomena of his own consciousness into the continent of nature, may think that it is, and reason of it as if it were; - this double nature of good, the one, as a thing, is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is, a part or member of a greater body, whereof the latter is in degree the greater and the worthier, as it tends to the conservation of a more general form' this distinction, which the philosopher of this school has laid down in his work on the scientific advancement of the human species, with a recommendation that it should be strongly planted, which he has planted there, openly, as the root of a new science of ethics and policy, will be found at the heart of all this new history of the human nature; but in this play of the true nobility, and the scientific cure of the commonweal, it is tracked openly to its most immediate, obvious, practical application. In all these great illustrated' scientific works, which this new school of learning, with the genius of science for its master, contrived to issue, all the universally actual and active principles are tracked to their proper specific modifications in man, and not to their development in his actual history merely; and the distinctive essential law of the human kind-the law whereby man is man, as distinguished from the baser kinds, is brought up, and worked out, and unfolded in all its detail, from the bosom of the universal law - is |