sult which all reformers in common desire.

Before making this attempt, it may be proper to premise-what will generally be conceded, we presume--that the common purpose of civil society is, or should be, to promote the happiness of all its members. That happiness can only be secured by the gratification of all those natural appetites, tastes and propensities, which are necessarily incident to our existence. A denial of any one of these gratifications will be a distinct cause of unhappiness, and will prove that the social state in which it occurred has thus far failed of its purpose. In so far as that social state is responsible for the evil, it requires change.

Now, it so happens, that in every society of which we have any knowledge, a very large proportion of its members have been denied, to a considerable extent, the enjoyments which we suppose necessary to their happiness. They have been compelled to struggle with their physical necessities-with political and social oppressions of one kind and another, for their whole lives. By the burden of supporting their existence, they have been excluded substantially from all participation in the more elevated and elevating enjoyments of which our nature is susceptible. The great mass of them cannot presume to have any ideal life. They are forever possessed by their material wants.Their minds are engrossed by day and by night-in season and out of season, in devising ways and means of satisfying the long procession of the appetites, as they approach, day after day, to enforce their uncompromising demands. In their incessant search after the means of living, they have been forced to forget the ends of life.

El propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. How is it possible for nations thus enthralled their finer sensibilities deadened or extirpated, to receive the highest culture, or a symmetrical moral developement? How is it possible for them to experience the emotions which spring from a pure taste, and from elevated sentiments? The inexorable constraints of their position must cut them off, to a great degree, from all this range of pleasures, and their æsthetic susceptibilities, from which all the pur

est and most precious enjoyments of our nature spring, must die out of them. To prevent the continuance of this state of things is the true office of the social reformer; for to secure its opposite is the great purpose of civil society.

Obviously the first step to this end is to supply these oppressive necessities for life and sustenance with less expenditure of time and energy than is now required, that leisure may accrue to be devoted to more spiritualizing pursuits. How this result is to be effected, is the great economical question, in the decision of which the whole human race have a permanent interest, and which lies at the foundation of all statesmanship and of all political philosophy.

To achieve this spiritual emancipation, it will be necessary to increase the product of a man's industry, so that a less amount of labor may supply his necessities, and also to teach men what their actual necessities are, that they may not be the prey of conventional tastes and appetites.

As the last result will, in our judgment, follow, inevitably, from the first for reasons which we may hereafter have occasion to render-we will confine ourselves to the consideration of the first, and will inquire if there be any hope of multiplying the product of a man's labor, so that his physical wants may not exclude the gratification of every other, and through what instrumentality that hope is to be realised.

If we have read aright the history of our race, and have at all comprehended the processes of its moral developement, we have discerned or imagined the quarter from whence the remedy is to be derived of which we are in quest.

We refer to an extended culture of the physical sciences and their enlarged application to the useful arts. It is by the aid of the physical sciences we hope to see the ample stores of nature subdued to the uses and convenience of men, and by the aid of powers which yet remain to be revealed. We believe that nature produces nothing which she is not competent to maintain according to the laws of its existence.-That its structural demands are but the shadows of promises which had preceded its creation, but which science might not yet have learned to interpret, and that it is to the man of science and the artisan that we are ultimately to look for the achieve

ment of this great work of social amelioration.

We say ultimately, for there is another agency to be employed, which the history of the physical sciences demonstrates to be indispensable to their prosperity. And that is the co-operation of free political institutions. It is only under the kindly influences of civil liberty and the amplest recognition of man's individual independence, that the natural sciences can be most successfully applied to the useful arts.

As the truth of this proposition lies at the base of our argument, we shall take the liberty of referring to the history of these sciences for its confirmation, and shall then endeavour to explain our reasons more at length for considering their growth and develop ment indispensable to the realization of that highest social enjoyment, the attainment of which we have indicated as the true end of all good government; and in the course of our inquiries we trust it will be made to appear, that it is to the political reformer to whom we must look as the immediate instrument under Providence for hastening a consummation so devoutly to be wished for.

According to the ancient mythology, which is but history transfigured, Prometheus is reported to have stolen from heaven the element of fire, of which Jupiter had interdicted the use to man. For this theft the sinning Titan was bound in chains, as the myth goes on Mount Caucasus, and an eagle was sent by Jupiter to prey upon his liver, which, by a cruel dispensation of the vindictive god, was permitted to grow during the night, as much as it was consumed during the day. After the lapse of many thousands of years, Hercules slew the eagle, and delivered the suffering Titan from his terrible bondage.

effort to rob the guarded treasury of nature of her resources to distribute them among the people, and it shows the joint supremacies of human and divine legislation combined to enforce its infliction.

How broadly contrasted with this picture of error, established by law, and sanctioned by religion, is the condition of the minister et interpres naturæ of our own time-the Prometheus of the nineteenth century. For him no rewards are esteemed excessive, no dignities too exalted. He has been lifted up from the ranks of an ignominious caste into full communion with society, and is encouraged in his fruitful toil with every protection which the power and the gratitude of free people can supply. He dreads no Caucasian wilderness, nor chains, nor bondage, nor torturing vultures, but goes forth to his ministrations of mercy like the wise man of the preacher, bearing length of days in his right hand, and in his left hand riches and honor.

We will proceed to show that the fable has not exaggerated the reality, and that the contrast we have attempted to indicate is amply exemplified in the past history of physical science.

We have been spared the necessity of entering into any very elaborate argument, to show the degraded condition of physical science in its application to the useful arts among the ancients, a condition which the foregoing interpretation implies, by the diligent pen of one of the most profound critics and accomplished scholars of our time. The questions which Mr. Macauley has once argued, rarely admit of farther debate. In his masterly dissertation upon the Baconian philosophy, and the new impulses it gave to the prosecution of physical science-the utter barrenness of all the old philosophies previous to the reformation is exhibited with such demonstrative energy, that we cannot feel that any accumulation of evidence on our part would add strength to his proofs, or increase our readers' confidence in his conclusions. At the best, we could but prove what none will be disposed to deny, that in nearly every department of natural science the ancient philosophers adopted a system of investigation fatally vicious-that they prosecuted it for no adequate objects, and that they achieved comparatively

none of its highest results. That the position of the operative before the law, was unjust and discouraging; before society, degrading; and that the nature of his pursuits effectually foreclosed his claim to any of the rewards to which an honorable and meritorious ambition would aspire.

Not only was all experimental science among them smitten with this abiding curse of barrenness, and degraded by the servile outcasts, who alone could stoop to officiate in her ministry--but the philosophers, those who should have been the lights, instead of blind guides to the industrious multitudes, looked down with scorn upon every attempt to direct the operations of nature to man's physical comfort. It was a source of infinite mortification to the wisest of them to be detected in ministering, however indirectly, to the practical wants of life. "To tell you my opinion now of the liberal sciences," says Seneca, "I have no great esteem for any that terminate in profit, or man's physical well-being; and yet I shall allow them to be so far beneficial as they only prepare the mind without detaining it." Eudoxus and Archytas, it is said, did so far forget the DIGNITY of Philosophy, as to profane geometry by a temporary application of its principles to the useful arts; but when they were discovered by Plato, their teacher, he denounced with great severity, "their unmanly and sordid effort," we quote from Plutarch: "to corrupt and debase geometry by causing her to descend from incorporeal to intellectual and sensible things, and requiring her to make use of matter which requires much manual labor, and is the object of servile trades." The chiding was efficacious. The humbled disciples abandoned their unworthy project with precipitation-Archytas to write his treatise on the number four, and Eudoxus, we may presume, to prosecute some no less elevating calculation.

There was one man among the Greeks from whom we might have looked for a superior philosophy, the character of whose mind and pursuits should have taught him, at least, that there is no irreconcileable hostility between man's physical and his spiritual welfare; but even Archimedes could not emancipate himself from the ab

surd prejudices of his time. Though the machines which he had contrived were the terror of his country's enemies, and though his marvellous penetration and clearness of intellect, which even in the time of Cicero had passed into a proverb, have associated his name with physical laws that will preserve it immortal as themselves, yet he did not affect to conceal his contempt for every result of his genius that might tend to the material comfort of his kind. "He had such a depth of understanding," says his biographer, "such a dignity of sentiment, and so copious a fund of mathematical knowledge, that though in the invention of these machines he acquired the reputation of a man endowed with divine rather than human knowledge, he yet did not vouchsafe to leave any account of them in writing, for he considered all attention to mechanics, and every art that ministers to common uses, as mean and sordid, and placed his whole delight in those intellectual speculations, which, without any relation to the necessities of life, have an intrinsic excellence, arising solely from truth and demonstration."

To these, perhaps unnecessary details, we may add, upon the authority of Pliny the younger, that Rome does not appear to have produced a single professional physician before the Empire. For mere external injuries, which might be prevented from preying for life upon the constitution of a patient, Plato, in his Ideal Republic, would barely tolerate the ministrations of medical aid; but why, said he, perpetuate the existence of a constitutional invalid. He cannot study-he cannot think. On such a man, the offices of the physician are wasted. The sooner he is removed, the better for himself and for those he leaves behind him. Such was the prevailing tone of all the ancient thinkers upon this and kindred subjects. All inquiry into the laws of matter," which was the object of servile trades," had to give place to the more elevating speculations about final causes, the mystical properties of numbers, the various ways of attaining unattainable conditions of mind, the differences between diaphora and adiaphora-between proegmena and apoproegmena, and similar debates de lana caprina, which

seemed to have supplanted every sympathy with the wants of our corporeal nature, and to have engrossed all the loftiest aspirations of their philosophies.

It is almost needless to pursue the destinies of our race through the dark valley of the middle ages, to learn the condition of physical science there. It had no condition. It could hardly be said to have any existence. Though the properties of the fulcrum and the principles of the hydrostatic paradox had already been propounded by Archimedes yet the sciences of mechanics and hydrostatics remained perfectly stationary for nearly two thousand years, and were not awakened to newness of life until the time of Galileo and Stevinus. Though the manufacture of glass must have been understood in the days of Socrates, yet the invention of the telescope, which would seem to be an almost obvious result, was not made until about the commencement of the seventeenth century. Comparative anatomy and zoology were taken up by Blumenbach and Cuvier, where they had been begun upwards of twenty centuries before, by Aristotle. Manardi, a contemporary of Luther, was obliged to go back for about the same period to find the science of botany, where it had been left in its feeblest infancy by Theophrastus.

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We can imagine the progress which the sciences of medicine and anatomy must have made, from the fact, that there is no satisfactory evidence that the dissection of the human body was even legalised until, in the sixteenth century, a council of the church, summoned for the purpose, at Salamanca, had resolved that it might be done without peril of souls.

Nor is this all. Not only did the acquisitions of the past receive no increase from their passage through the intellect of the twenty generations which succeeded them, but, on the contrary, they were so entirely refracted from their original proportions, that they seem at times to have been to those who inherited them, rather a curse than a benefaction. Their chemistry was alchemy, which, allying itself in turn to the dreams of the Cabbalists, of the Rosicrucians, and of the Theosophers at each successive step, wandered farther and farther from every practical

truth.

Their astronomy was astrology. Their mathematics was mystical arithmetic; and their physiological science was demonology and witchcraft. The sagacious Kepler was himself an astrologer; and Tycho Brahe, says Gassendi, his biographer, kept an idiot about him for the benefit of his prophecies, to which this prince of astronomers, as he was called, was accustomed to listen as to revelations.

But we will not multiply proofs of a fact which has been written with a finger of light upon almost every page of history-that the experimental sciences had no substantial existence-no powers of self-maintenance and self-propagation previous to the fifteenth century, and that their application to the useful arts is a glory which belongs entirely to modern civilization. And why was this?

why was it left to the men of a later age-to the pupils of Bacon-to the offspring of seventy generations of thinking men, first to penetrate the dark realms of the material universe-to explore its inexhaustible resources, and to adapt them to the comfort and happiness of mankind? By what spell enchanted-to what idol kneeling, was the genius of those ancient Greeks-the countrymen of Pythagoras, of Socrates, of Plato and of Aristotle-that they left their posterity to strike the first alliance between philosophy and the useful arts?

We must find our answer where the world has been but too much disposed to look for example and advice-in the ill-advised political and social systems of the ancients, which compressed in their iron embrace the intellect of all the ancient world, and shaped it to those results.

In the theory and in the practice of the governments of antiquity, man was but a fragment of the state-in their theocracies but a worm of the dust, without any individuality, and protected by no political guarantees which were not liable to be withdrawn in any exigency. Industry, liberty-and even life itself-were but public property, held to private use at the will of the state. The individual man was nothing;—the state was everything.

Are proofs of this required? Look at the ostracism of the Greeks, which, by the operation of the law, acting through its usual and constituted or

gans, drove the citizen, like Ishmael, naked and an hungered, from his home, his friends, and his country, without even the forms of a trial or the pretence of a crime. Look at their international law, which treated all foreigners as barbarians, and all barbarians taken captive in war, as slaves by the law of nature. It was enough that they were the enemies of the state;-what kind of men they were, the state would not stay its vengeance to inquire. Again: mark the dictator at Rome, at whose nod every other law became speechless-every legal or natural right of the citizen was extinguished, and who held in his hands absolute control over the life of every Roman subject," that the state should take no detriment." And, finally, look at their theogony, which subjected all the wishes, intentions and powers-not only of men, but of gods themselves to the blind control of an omnipotent, unrelenting, unappeasable destiny-an overruling fate, deaf to the voice of prayer and supplication, even when put up by Jove himself blind alike to the beauties of virtue and to the deformities of vice; regardless of all powers in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth, save its own inscrutable will; for such are the attributes uniformly ascribed to this dread omnipotence by the poets and the theosophers, the only evangelists of the Pagan faith.

Now, the natural theologies of all nations have ever been but an idealization or an exaggeration of some predominating national sentiment. Power, in whatever form, exhibited among the Pagans, in time received the glory of deification. Destiny was but the state seen through the religious imaginations of the Greeks. What fate was over the universe, that was the state over the individual man. Its will was lawfrom its necessities there was no escape but in sacrifice; from its command there was no resource but in obedience. Man had no rights so personal or so private -no sentiments so sacred, but they might be crushed under the wheels of this insatiable Juggernaut. The son might be torn from his parents at an age when the watchful eye of parental tenderness was still required to guard his yet unpractised steps, and dedicated to her perpetual service. At her re

morseless summons, the pride of the father and the yearning affection of the mother were suppressed. Even the last most sacred citadel of human liberty, the individual conscience, was obliged to suspend upon its outer wall a banner of her devising. A neglect of this profession of allegiance was but too often fatal, not only to the liberty, but to the life of the patriot and the sage-but the terrors of its penalty appear never to have awakened for a moment, even in the breast of the wisest of its victims, the suspicion that the state had exceeded her rightful authority, or had exercised a single unnecessary prerogative. In this absolute negation of political individuality it is sufficiently obvious, that the happiness and comfort of the masses of men, never entered into the projects of the statesman, or the speculations of the philosopher. What should ameliorate their physical condition-what should make them happier and better as individuals-what should dignify them in the world's esteem by associating their pursuits with the honorable accessories of talent, of virtue, and of social distinction, was unworthy the deliberations of enlightened men. We look in vain throughout the ancient world for the exhibition of any systematic philanthropy. The great heart of the state never beat in harmony with the pulse of the individual. Why study to furnish new sources of enjoyment, new facilities for avoiding, and new faculties for encountering the calamities of life, to those whose happiness or whose misery is alike unimportant? The state only needs soldiers, priests and magistrates; such was the political philosophy of Aristotle. Poets, philosophers and artists may be encouraged, for that while they adorn and discipline the mind, they give moral strength to the government.

"But," continues the philosopher, men habitually addicted to the lowly pursuits of providing necessaries and accumulating gain, are unfit members of our republic, because they are incapable of relishing those enjoy ments in which we have supposed their chief pleasure to consist. They are to be classed with things necessary to the commonwealth, but not as citizens; and a commonwealth founded on valour cannot provide for the happiness of men who are but fee