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INTELLECTUAL
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
THE PKESENT AGE
SAMUEL WARREN, F.R.S.
ONE OF HER MAJESTY'S COUNSEL, AND RECORDER OF HULL
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLIII
PRINTED BY WILIJAM BT.ACKWOOD AND
PREFACE.
THE origin of this little work is indicated in a
passage which may be seen near the commence-
ment.
It would be unbecoming in the Author to print
a copy of the too flattering Resolution of the
President and Council of the Hull Literary .and
Philosophical Society there referred to, and partly
in consequence of which, the paper in question,
somewhat modified and amplified, is now pre-
sented to the public. It treats of subjects which
have occupied his thoughts for many years ; and
all he begs to be given credit for, is a good inten-
tion. For the rest, he must surrender himself to
criticism with what fortitude he may.
Two-thirds of the paper were read on the even-
ing of Tuesday, the 28th December 1852, and
listened to with an attention amply repaying the
Author's efforts to present an extensive and diffi-
cult subject, in an acceptable manner, to a mixed
and very large audience.
2017855
A deputation, in considerable numbers, from the
Mechanics' Institute of Hull, formed part of that
audience, in pursuance of a liberal and friendly
invitation from the President and Council of the
Literary and Philosophical Society : a circum-
stance which afforded the Author peculiar gratifi-
cation.
INNER TEMPLE, LONDON,
January 1853.
MR PRESIDENT,
AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
I HOPE that the special relation in which I
stand towards this populous borough, and its ancient
town and corporation* a town which has num-
bered among those of its citizens the noble names
of Andrew Marvel, and William Wilberforce will,
together with a fact which I shall presently men-
tion, satisfactorily account for my appearance be-
fore you this evening, in a position to myself at
once new, and responsible. As a member of the
Bar, and also exercising judicial functions among
you, such a position as I now occupy is intended,
* The town and county of Kingston-upon-Huil, commonly called
Hull, was constituted a free borough, with extensive immunities,
under a charter of Edward I., dated the 1st April 1299. For up-
wards of a century, however, before that time, it had been a sea-
port of considerable mercantile importance. See Frost's Notices
relative to the early history of the town and port of Hull, [A.D.
1827,] and The Encyclopaedia, Britannica, tit. "Hull."
A
2 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
I can assure you, to be a solitary one in my life-
time ; and it is also an embarrassing one, because
not in unison with my professional habits and ob-
jects. On the occasion, however, of my first judicial
visit to this town, in last October, I received an un-
expected and earnest request from the President and
Council of the Literary and Philosophical Society
of this place, to read a paper before the Society, and
on any subject which I might select. After much
consideration, I expressed my willingness to do so,
and chose the subject now before us. Some time
afterwards, I was honoured by receiving a unani-
mous resolution of the President and Council,
soliciting me " to take steps, by anticipation, to
commit the paper to the press, in order that it may
be perused, at as early a period as possible, by those
who cannot hear the paper read with a view to
its extended usefulness." I own that I was not a
little affected by so signal a mark of confidence ;
and have already, as far as I have been able, com-
plied with the request.
As I feel it a very responsible honour, under
these circumstances, to appear before you, so I beg
your indulgence, and your sustained attention,
while I endeavour to lay before you, though, it
may be, very imperfectly, some of the results of
nearly a quarter of a century's observation and
reflection, on many subjects of the highest interest
and importance. It is in vain for me, however,
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 3
as it would be foolish, to attempt to burthen
you with all the dismaying mass of manuscript
which I hold in my hand ; and, finally, before start-
ing on our extensive and venturous expedition, 1
have to assure you, that nothing shall fall from me
calculated to provoke difference of opinion, except
so far as is unavoidable in addressing any mixed
and independent auditory. Above all things, I
shall eschew everything even approaching to a
political or sectarian character. This, indeed, your
rules discreetly prohibit; and to those rules my
own purpose and feelings dictate a rigorous adhe-
rence.
Well, then, we are here assembled, only a day
or two after Christmas Day ! Let us regard the
season the occasion as a halcyon interval of
repose, in which our cheerfulness is blended with
solemnity, while reflecting upon that Event, so sub-
lime and awful in the estimation of all Christians,
Avhich invests the close of every year with, as it
were, a grand halo. The eager, noisy world,
with all its wild passions, and the transient pur-
suits which stimulate them, is, for a while, happily
shut out ; leaving us to breathe a serene atmo-
sphere.
Be still, ye winds ! ye zephyrs, cease to blow,
While music most melodious meets my ear
the " still sad music of humanity," which may be
heard echoing while we fix our eyes upon MAN and
4 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
his mysterious manifestations in his momentous
relations to the Past, the Present, and the Future.
May I, however, in a more cheery spirit, make
a passing allusion to a topic occasionally exciting
a lively interest out of doors ? the budget of our
Chancellor of the Exchequer ! Let me conceive
myself to have been installed your Chancellor of
the Exchequer intellectual; and here, at your
service, is my Budget ; but it will be forced to deal
very summarily with the income and expenditure of
THOUGHT its Resources its Ways and Means
and the circulating medium of that thought, which
is its language or literature. I cannot, alas ! hold
out the hopes of taking off any taxes, but, on the
contrary, must impose a somewhat heavy one on
your attention! My Budget will deal with a vast
variety of topics some of them of great delicacy,
difficulty, and moment ; topics coming home to
the business and bosom of each of us, and chal-
lenging our anxious consideration. We cannot sur-
vey, for the purpose of practically estimating, the in-
tellectual and moral development of the age in which
we live and are playing our parts every man and
woman of us having his or her own responsible
mission to perform without attempting gravely
and comprehensively to consider man in ordained
relation to his power, and his knowledge, his ob-
jects, his sayings and his doings, his position past
and present, and his destiny. It is difficult to
OF THE PRESENT AGE, 5
imagine any period for making such an attempt
more interesting and inviting than the present
one, in many respects, very dazzling ; and in others,
exciting concern and surprise. In one direction, it
may be that we see a vast space passed over in a
little time ; in another, a long time with scarce
any space passed over at all ; though in each case
human intellect has been occupied and taxed to its
uttermost apparent capabilities. These are mat-
ters justifying, and even demanding, attentive con-
sideration. It will be necessary, with this view, to
soar high and far, but swiftly, into the stupendous
starry solitude of space ; to descend, as far as rnan^s
limited means allow him, into the interior of the
earth; and, again, to travel all round its surface,
in order to ascertain what we know, or think we
know, of the human and animal denizens of that
earth, and of the nature and relations of that earth
itself; and, finally, to penetrate, as far as we may,
and with a tender respect, into that mystery of
mysteries, MAN himself.* And this, not with the
view of attempting an ostentatious display of his
doings, his discoveries of the exploits of his genius,
which might serve only to inflate a foolish pride,
to generate spurious motives to action, and, in
short, and above all, induce a fatal I repeat, a
* " Alas !" says Coleridge, speaking of the difficulty of fixing the
attention of men on the world within them, " the largest part of
mankind are nowhere greater strangers than at home."
6 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
fatal confusion between MEANS and ENDS ; which
last words contain the key of all that is to follow.
Let us, on the contrary, try to look at Man, as he
has been told by God that he t's, placed upon this
planet, by a direct incomprehensible act of creation,
by that God whose image, though now darkened,
he bears, and between whom and himself there
exist relations inconceivably awful and momentous.
Those relations it is surely of infinite consequence
to us to ascertain accurately, as far as we can ;
because they directly and permanently affect human
conduct and destiny. On a due perception, indeed,
of those relations, duly acted upon, rest the true
and only enduring dignity of human nature, the
actual inevitable difference between one man and
another, and the only real uses and aims of intel-
lect and knowledge. I hope to place in a distinct
point of view the proposition, that as it is possible
for a man to have a prodigious knowledge of
the facts of philosophy, without a glimmering of
its spirit ; so the human intellect may be endowed
with great strength and capacity, be consum-
mately trained in the exercise of its faculties,
and richly stored with the fruits of literature and
philosophy, and yet its possessor be all the while
mentally purblind nay more, destitute of an atom
of moral worth : serving, to the eye of the Christian
philosopher and moralist, only to illustrate the de-
plorable, degrading, and perilous consequences of a
OF THE PRESENT AGE.
want of it, in the individual case, and, in the general
one, to reveal to us a sort of moral and intellectual
chaos. I say, intellectual as well as moral. And in
the former case, why should I not call up, for an in-
stant, the spectre of La Place, whose great intellect
could occupy itself during a lifetime with the sub-
limest truths of astronomy, to no better purpose
than to deny the existence of the Almighty Maker
of the universe ; impiously to insinuate that the
supposed useful purposes of our system could have
been accomplished otherwise, and better, than at
present ! and, finally, to discard religion, and the
sanctions which it derives from a future existence
and its conditions, as a cruel imposture practised
upon the ignorant credulity of mankind ! * Believe
me, there are real relations between physical and
moral science there are profound relations between
intellect and morality, involving everything that
concerns the highest interests of mankind ; and it
cannot be otherwise than interesting and import-
* It is right, however, here to state that M. La Place, not long be-
fore his death, intimated to a distinguished English philosopher (Pro-
fessor Sedgwick) a great change of opinion. Having spoken to him
earnestly on the religious character of our endowments, and course
of academical study, M. La Place added : " I think this right; and
on this point I deprecate any great organic changes in your sys-
tem ; for I have lived long enough to know what at one time I did
not believe that no society can be upheld in happiness and honour,
without the sentiments of religion." This remarkable statement is
made on the authority of Professor Sedgwick himself, who says it is
in the very words of M. La Place, " as nearly as I can translate
them." See the Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cain-
Iridge, 5th edit.
8 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
ant, to seek for every ray of light which may con-
tribute towards showing us the real nature of these
relations. The General is made up of the Particu-
lar the Whole, of its parts ; and there may be
personal consequences depending upon the minutest
moral actions of mankind, as real, great, and per-
manent, as the causes entailing them appeared
trivial and temporary, and were, in fact, while
operating, wholly unperceived. The old philoso-
phers said, that Nature does nothing in vain, in
the physical world ; and so, in the mighty moral
economy under which w r e have been placed by our
Almighty Maker, let us rest satisfied that nothing
has been done by Him in vain, and perhaps also,
nothing by the creatures whom He has made the
subjects of that economy. The possession and use
of intellect entail great moral and religious respon-
sibilities ; and between one who thinks otherwise,
and those with whom I think, there is fixed a great
gulf, in respect of speculation, action, and conduct;
there exists a distinction involving the entire theory
and basis of morality, its Motives and Sanctions,
its Means and Ends.
Do not, however, be startled by this sudden
glimpse into gloom into the profound abysses of
abstract speculation, which I now quit for a time ;
but remember, that these considerations constitute
a reality all the while, surrounding us even as the
atmosphere envelops the earth : and let us, in
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 9
passing on to lighter subjects, and hovering over
them for a time, carry with us, nevertheless, an
oracular saving of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, '.' What-
ever we talk, things are as they are, not as we
grant, dispute, or hope ; depending on neither our
affirmative nor negative, but upon the rate and
value which GOD sets upon things." *
Permit me here to say what is sought to be in-
dicated by the word Development. I use it in
its strict etymological signification ; that is to say,
an ( opening,' f a ' showing forth/ a ' displaying'
of the intellectual and moral condition of man in
the present age. And you will say is this to
be done in a single evening's paper ? It sounds,
indeed, as hopeless as the notion of compressing the
Iliad within a nutshell. Nevertheless, the attempt
must be made to survey this vast field, however
rapidly, and however hard it may be to know where
to begin. The great object is for the observer to
select a right point of view. On that depends every-
thing ; for there is a point from which everything
within and without us is order and loveliness, and
another from which all is contradiction and confu-
sion. There is a string which, " untuned" we may
well call out fearfully
" Hark ! what discord follows ! "
* Works, vol. xi. p. 198, (Bishop Rebel's edition.)
f " Desveloper," "developer," perhaps from deorsum volvere, to
roll back, to open, unwrap, or unfold anything rolled in a volume.
Cotgrave, as cited in Richardson's Dictionary.
10 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
I shall glance first at our LITERATURE* the
current coin, so to speak, of the realm Intellectual
the circulating medium of thought, by which
Intellect communicates with Intellect, in both the
present and past ages. And it is one pre-eminent
characteristic of the present age, that though the
issue of this coin is infinitely greater than the world
has ever seen before, it yet scarcely equals our
requirements. The mint is kept in incessant action,
though its capabilities have been immensely aug-
mented ! Let me now, however, advert, for a
moment, to the metal out of which this coin is
made our language. Is gold pouring into our
cellars as it is into those of the Bank of England '?
Our English language is a noble one, worthy of
the most jealous guardianship ; and the slightest
tendency to deteriorate it, by writing or speaking
it in a slovenly way, or introducing, from any sort
* The etymology of this word is not by any means determined.
It is traced clearly through the French, Italian, and Spanish lan-
guages, to the Latin litera ; which may perhaps, as suggested by
Mr Richardson, be taken from litum, the past participle of liner e,
to smear ; as one of the earliest modes of writing was by graving
the characters upon tablets, which were smeared over or covered
with wax. (Pliny, lib. xiii. c. 11.) These wax tablets were written
on with an instrument of iron or brass, (stilus or stylus,) resembling
a pencil in size and shape, sharpened at one end, the other extre-
mity of it being flat and circular, for the purpose of obliterating
what had been written, and rendering the waxen surface smooth
again. A picture found in Herculaneum, and of which an en-
graving is given in Dr Smith's Dictionary of Grecian and Roman
Antiquities, represents a Roman with his tablet and " stilus; "
whence the English word "style."
OP THE PRESENT AGE. 11
of conceit, and to catch a momentary notoriety,
vulgar novelties, ought to be treated as attempts
at defilement and disfigurement ; and should entail
instant critical censure and contempt, on the part
of those who are interested in handing down our
language, in all its purity, beauty, strength, and
dignity, to posterity, as it were a sacred heir-loom.
That language we ought to be every day more and
more solicitous thus to cherish and protect ; for it is
daily and hourly spreading over the whole habitable
globe, and seems destined to gain a complete ascen-
dancy over all others now spoken and written.
Look into the New World, and see there, in the Far
West, the mighty daughter of a mighty mother,
of whom she is, and ought to be, proud ! She can,
when she pleases, speak the language of that mother
with as much elegance and force as her parent,
towards whom she must often turn with yearning
fondness and pride. Ah, what are the feelings
with which, as I have several times been assured
by themselves, our gifted brethren from the West
first catch sight of the white cliffs of Albion ! They
often watch, for that purpose, through the live-
long night ; and when Old England becomes visible,
even as a dim speck beyond the waters, a thousand
and a thousand times have their tears gushed
forth, while they gazed, in silent tenderness, on the
little island from which came their own ancestors
in which its own their own SHAKSPEARE was
12 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
born ; that island which he so dearly loved, and has
rendered immortal ; of which he spoke in very
moving words, that make an Englishman's heart
thrill when he hears them as " this sceptred isle"
" this little world "
This precious stone, set in the silver sea
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England !
This land of such dear souls this dear, dear land ! *
So wrote Shakspeare, with quivering pen, in Queen
Elizabeth's day ; and so, nearly three centuries
afterwards, read we, with quivering hearts, in
Queen Victoria's day the Sovereign Lady of this
same dear sceptred isle we, who are able, and
resolved, that, with God's blessing on our stout
hearts and strong arms, it shall pass down for cen-
turies hence to her descendants, and to our descend-
ants aye shall that " precious stone, set in the
silver sea" its guardians knowing neither fear nor
foe or, knowing, only to defy ! Could I call up
Shakspeare before you, how would you tremble
with emotion as you heard that noble spirit speak
his own words :
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Come the three corners of the world in arras,
And we shall shock them ! Naught shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true ! f
Who can listen to this, and not feel pride on re-
* Richard II. act ii. scene 1. f King John, conclusion.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 13
fleeting, that perhaps at this very moment our
brethren and sisters at the antipodes may be recit-
ing it, and thinking, with swelling hearts, of their
little island home, and of us whom they have left
behind in it ? Let me sum up all that an English-
man can say, in a line a little varied, it is true -
of our great Poet himself
One touch of Shalspeare makes the whole world kin i
And shall not the descendants and countrymen
of Shakspeare and Milton, and so many other illus-
trious writers of our glorious Saxon language, alike
in prose and in verse, strive to protect that lan-
guage from pollution, and hand it down pure as we
received it ? Or shall they calmly contemplate its
being rapidly deteriorated by those who were never
able to appreciate that purity, and are consequently
indifferent about preserving it? I repeat it, that
our fast-quitting brethren and sisters God go
with them ! are carrying, in increasing numbers,
our language into every region of the globe ; a
fact which of itself should suffice to quicken our
vigilance to keep the source of that language pure.
" The treasures of our tongue," says one who has
conferred inestimable service on that tongue,* "are
spread over continents, scattered among islands in
* Dr Richardson, by his " New Dictionary of the English Lan-
guage ; combining Explanation with Etymology, and illustrated by
Quotations from the best Authors, arranged chronologically from
the earliest period to the beginning of the present century."
2 vols. 4to. This admirable work constitutes almost a library of
14 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
the northern and the southern hemisphere, from
' the unformed Occident to the strange shores of
unknowing nations in the East.' The sun, indeed,
now never sets upon the empire of Great Britain.
Not one hour of the twenty-four, in which the
earth completes her diurnal revolution not one
round of the minute-hand of the dial, is allowed to
pass, in which, on some portion of the surface of the
globe, the air is not filled ' with accents that are
ours.' They are heard in the ordinary transactions
of life, or in the administration of law, or in the
deliberations of the senate house or council-chamber,
in the offices of private devotion, or in the public
observance of the rites and duties of a common
faith."
This noble language, finally, enshrines reveren-
tially the Holy volume, the oracles of God, which
His pious servants in this island are disseminating,
in countless millions of copies, among mankind in
every quarter of the globe. Should not that of itself
be a grand incentive to us, both speakers and writers,
to do our best to preserve the identity of that lan-
guage, by keeping its choice treasures, as models
of simplicity, strength, and beauty, constantly
before our eyes, and in our thoughts ? Oh ! let us
imitate the Greeks and Romans in the noble and
English books in itself ; and its learned and indefatigable compiler
has recently received a fitting recognition of his merits, by a pen-
sion, conferred through the Earl of Derby, then Prime Minister, by
her Majesty, (A.D. 1852.)
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 15
emulous care with which they developed and pre-
served their renowned languages, which have con-
sequently come down to us in unimpaired fresh-
ness, beauty, and splendour, amidst
" The waves and weathers of time"
come down to us in such guise, as to leave us al-
most in doubt which to admire more their thought,
or the exquisite language which conveys it !
I say these things only for the advantage of the
younger portions of this large audience, and of
those who may hereafter think it worth while to
read what I am now uttering ; and to them, would
that I could speak trumpet-tongued on this subject,
which has always lain near my heart. Let them
(I mean the younger folk) believe the assertion,
which will be readily supported by the greatest
masters of our language, that to write English
with vigour and purity is really a high, and also a
rare, accomplishment : much rarer, indeed, than it
ought to be, and would be, if youthful aspirants
would only conceive rightly, and bear ever in mind,
the importance of the object, and the efforts indis-
pensable to secure it. This accomplishment in-
volves, in my opinion, early and careful culture,
continued attention, and sedulous practice, fami-
liarity with the choicest models, and no incon-
siderable degree of natural taste and refinement.
One thus endowed and accomplished must some-
16 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
times shudder at the extent to which he may see
our language vitiated by needless and injurious
incorporations of foreign words and idioms, and
vulgar, fleeting colloquialities, of our own viler
growth,* which are utterly inconsistent with the
dignity of high and enduring literature. Any
man of talent, or more especially of genius, (a dis-
tinction difficult to put into words, but real and
great, and not in degree, but kind,) who disregards
these considerations, offends the genius of English
letters ; and indeed, let him rest assured, commits
a sort of literary suicide. He may be unconsciously
disgusting thousands nay, tens of thousands, of
persons competent to detect, at an indignant
glance, these impertinent and vulgar departures
from propriety : familiar with the finest models of
ancient and modern literature ; persons, in short,
whose estimation constitutes the true and only path-
way to posterity. If their fiat, or imprimatur, be
withheld, (and it is given only after a stern scru-
tiny,) the eager ambitious traveller will by and by
find out, to his mortification, that he has started
loithout his passport. I am not now speaking
simply of the numerous professed and habitual
critics of the present day, who constitute, as they
* It is one feature of Richardson's Dictionary, that he never
gives words of this description, but those only which are supported
by the carefully-selected writers, whom he cites in every instance,
commencing with the close of the thirteenth, and ending with the
commencement of the present century.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 17
ought to do, a vigilant and expert literary police,
doubtlessly restraining many an intruding offender;
but also of the great body of readers, ay, of
either sex who feel no inclination to express
their refined criticisms in print, or become mem-
bers of what are called " literary circles," which
too often contain only second, third, or fourth-
rate aspirants to literary reputation, none of whom
experience the promptings of conscious and inde-
pendent strength, and cannot stand alone, but
combine, in little efforts, too often only to dis-
parage those who can, and do. The higher class,
to which I am alluding, exercise, nevertheless,
an influence which may, in one respect, be com-
pared to Gravitation, which is unseen, unheard,
but irresistible ; and all young writers should
consider this, before they rush into a presence
so formidable. I hope it may not be deemed
presumptuous, if one venture to express a fear
whether the number of writers in the present day
may not bear too great a proportion to readers ;
and whether, again, many of those writers do not
become such, without adequate reflection and pre-
paration. No event, no incident of any kind, of
the least interest or importance, now occurs in any
branch of literature, science, politics, or in the
ordinary course even of domestic life, but ten thou-
sand pens are instantly set in motion simultaneously
for the press, whose swarthy unseen battalions are
18 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
forthwith at work to submit these hasty lucubra-
tions to the public. Yet it cannot be denied that
the current of our periodical literature, running
alike through daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly
channels, must appear, upon the whole, to even a
captious, if a competent, censor, highly creditable
to an accomplished age. I can most conscientiously
express my belief, that for a long time no periodical
of note has been established in this country which
has not disclosed the desire of its conductors to fit
it, for the purpose of innocent recreation and infor-
mation, to readers of both sexes, and of all ages
and classes. It is a fact, however, stated with
concern and reluctance, that there is a poisonous
growth of libertine literature* if the last word be
not indeed libelled by such a use of it designed
for the lowest classes of society ; supplied, more-
over, to an extent scarcely equal to the demand
for it, and which exists to an extent unfortunately
little suspected. I know not how this dreadful
evil is to be encountered, except by affording
every possible encouragement, from every quarter,
to the dissemination, in the cheapest practical form,
* Some years ago, a notorious writer of this class, when far ad-
vanced in life, called upon me, and in the course of conversation,
with tears in his eyes, deplored having prostituted his powers to
corrupt the minds, and unsettle the religious opinions, of his
readers ; and with anguished energy added, " What would I not
give at this moment to annihilate everything that bears my name,
and to be able to say on my death-bed, that I had left ' no line
which, dying, I coAild wish to blot.' "
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 19
of wholesome and engaging literature. If poison
be cheap, let its antidote be cheaper.
In this great and free country, public opinion
must express itself promptly on current political
events, which are from day to day treated with a
degree of ability indicating the very masterly
hands that are at work. In fact, I personally know
several instances of contributions to the current
political literature of the day, by persons whose
high social rank, position, and pretensions whose
proved knowledge, ability, and celebrity, are little
suspected by their readers, and whose names would
insure almost universal attention and deference.
Rapidity and power largely characterise our
POLITICAL LITERATURE ; and let me also add, in a
spirit of honest pride and truth, that it is very
rarely defaced by personality, invasion of the sanc-
tities of private life, or the slightest trace of immo-
rality or licentiousness. Exceptions may possibly
exist ; but I defy any one to adduce instances of
successful and prolonged indecorums of this de-
scription. The spirit of the age will not tolerate
them ; and our writers dare not, nor do they wish,
to offend that just and dignified spirit.
Thus the freedom of the Press an enormous
engine in a highly civilised community, and where
its action is not oppressed by the heavy hand of
tyranny is worthily used by a free, a great, and
a good people, if one of the humblest may be per-
20 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
initted so to characterise his fellow-countrymen ;
and long may it so continue ! And yet no nation
is more subject than our own, from the very neces-
sities of its social condition, to vivid political and
polemical excitement, calling forth, or having a
tendency to call forth, all the most fierce and
violent passions of our nature.
Passing with this honest and unbiassed expres-
sion of opinion, from that portion of our literature
which is professedly devoted to the treatment of
ephemeral topics and objects, I wish to say a few
words on the writers of separate and independent
works speaking again, as in the presence of youth-
ful aspirants to literary distinction. Let them ask
themselves whether they wish that which they
purpose writing, to live ? If they do, it is really
properly considered a bold aspiration : it is to
elevate themselves above innumerable millions of
mankind who never were, nor can, nor will, be so
distinguished from their fellows. Ought not, then,
the pains and effort, both in duration and intensity,
to be commensurate ? Rely upon it that Horace
is right
Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metarn,
Multa tulit, fecitque puer, sudavit, et alsit.
Provided the aspirant believe himself intellectu-
ally fit to attempt attaining so resplendent a posi-
tion, let him consider as he will, if moved by
superior impulses, which are powerless to inferior
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 21
minds how to select subjects of enduring interest
to mankind, and then to treat them in a high and
catholic spirit, so as to attract the human heart
and intellect, which, let him ever bear in mind, are
one and the same in all times and places, and un-
affected by fleeting topics and associations, how-
ever powerfully intense for the moment. Those
who were swayed by them pass away quickly and
for ever. A month, a year, a generation, a cen-
tury, and all trace of them, their sayings and their
doings, has perished, as completely as disappears
breath from the polished surface of the mirror.
Having selected a fitting subject, let him imitate
the glorious devotion of those great ones of past
time, whose works still glitter vividly before our
eyes, even as they did before charmed contempo-
rary eyes. The writers of Greece and Rome un-
derwent a degree of heroic self-denial and labour,
which, in our day, we can hardly realise ; but we
behold with admiration the realised and imperish-
able results: their transcendent performances in
poetry, philosophy, history, and oratory, such as
it now requires great effort and high attainments
even only moderately to understand and appre-
ciate. Let me mention, in passing, an incident
relating to Thucydides.
When only sixteen yeai's of age, he heard Hero-
dotus, then not more than twenty-nine years old,
recite his charming History, as was the custom, in
22 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
public; and wept with the intensity of his emotions.
From that moment he conceived and cherished the
high ambition of becoming himself an historian ;
and how he ultimately acquitted himself, his noble
history of the Peloponnesian war is extant to tell
us ; and, in doing so, to exhibit a model of history
for all time to come. Such was the admiration of
this great performance by Demosthenes, that he
transcribed it eight times ! and became so familiar
with it, that he could repeat almost the whole of it !
There may, for aught any of us know, be pre-
sent in this great assembly, some gifted spirit re-
solved on silently preparing to face posterity, to
secure a literary immortality : self-denying and
self-reliant, fixing an eagle eye on remote and
applauding ages ; calmly content to make every
sacrifice, even that of contemporaneous approbation
and enthusiasm. Let him not, however, despair of
even this latter; for there are acute and watchful
eyes ever open to scan the pretensions of real great-
ness persons generously eager, for the honour
and reputation of the age, to bring that greatness
forward and do it homage wherever it presents
itself. I would say to such a one, Hail, young
candidate for future and undying renown ! Be-
think you, that you are treading in the steps of
immortal predecessors, who, could they but speak
to you, might say, Remember ! Persevere !
But, alas ! in the special circumstances of the pre-
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 23
sent age, when mental power is so early and
universally stimulated into action, Power may be
great, but inseparably linked to Poverty, which
compels it to relinquish, with a swelling heart, its
proud aspiration to delight and instruct future ages,
in order simply to live to exist, in its own day.
Well, in that case, O fettered, harassed, and noble
spirit ! look proudly inward ! Consider how the
Deity has distinguished you by His endowments ;
and bow with cheerful reverence and submission
to Him and to His will, which is guided by in-
scrutable wisdom, in this, to you, apparently hard
dispensation. Your present position is perfectly
known to Him who could change it in the twink-
ling of an eye, and may do so. In the mean time,
regard Him steadfastly as the Father of Lights,
from whom descends every good and perfect gift; and
persuade your heart that the Father will not forget
his Son.
Before quitting this topic, suffer me to say one
word most earnestly to deprecate undervaluing the
inestimable advantages of a classical education.
Those in the present day most keenly and bitterly
appreciate this remark, who are experiencing the
practical consequences of a want of classical educa-
tion. What are they to do, in either public or pri-
vate society, when allusions and quotations are
made, which, however erroneous and absurd, they
cannot detect or rectify however apposite and
24 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
beautiful, they cannot appreciate? They appear,
necessarily, vulgar, inglorious mutes. And further
than this, how can they really master a language,
which, like our own, is so largely indebted to
those of Greece and Rome? The finest writers
and speakers in the present and former times,
have been those most richly imbued with classi-
cal literature, which had at once chastened and
elevated their taste, and made it impossible for
them to stumble into coarseness or vulgarity.
Great natural powers, aided by much practice,
may undoubtedly enable their possessor to make
right eloquent use of his mother tongue ; but he is
never safe from disclosing the absence of early clas-
sical culture; and were his time to come over again,
would strain every nerve to acquire such precious
advantages. From the moment that such notions be-
come in the ascendant, that early classical education
is a superfluity, the links which bind the intellect
of age after age to those of Greece and Rome are
snapped asunder. From that moment refined taste
will disappear ; and, moreover, the best school for
training the youthful intellect to early and exact
habits of thought and expression, will be irrecover-
ably lost.- A fox was once advised to get rid of
his tail, by a friend, who gave him many convinc-
ing reasons for dispensing with so troublesome,
ungraceful, and useless an appendage ; but all of a
sudden, the first-mentioned fox discovered that his
OP THE PRESENT AGE. 25
astute and eloquent companion had, somehow or
another, contrived to lose his own tail. I thought
of this some years ago, when listening to a well-
known orator of the day, volubly declaiming against
the folly of a classical education, of which almost
every word he was uttering showed himself to he
totally destitute.
Another feature of the literature of the age, is the
immense and incessant multiplication of ELEMEN-
TARY works in every department of knowledge.
On this, two remarks may he offered : First, the
best often indicate a great advance on those of
former days, and a high appreciation of the princi-
ples which ought to regulate the communication of
knowledge to learners. Secondly, the common run
seem sometimes to show, in the authors or com-
pilers, teachers who have scarcely finished being
learners; and not unnaturally imagine that that
which so recently seemed novel and difficult to
themselves, must needs be so to all other learners,
and yet have missed the notice of all other teachers.
Such an incessant supply, however, must, in some
degree, indicate a corresponding demand; and that
is of itself a cheering sign of the times. Whoever
has made an honest and creditable effort to dis-
seminate pleasing and useful information, has so far
deserved well of the age in which he lives, and has
contributed, however humbly, his share in its ad-
vancement. How can he tell how many persons
26 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
he may have delighted and instructed, and be-
guiled away from ruinous intemperance and profli-
gacy ?
Some persons complacently call the present a
superficial age ; but I, for one, am not presump-
tuous enough thus to characterise, if not slander,
the times in which we live. Such observations
often proceed from a shallow flippancy, unworthy
of serious attention. Those, however, who may
properly be charged with pluming themselves un-
duly on the possession of mere elementary know-
ledge, perhaps too hastily acquired, it may be well
to apprise of an observation of Locke, worthy to be
written in letters of gold, and to be ever before the
eyes of those now alluded to. " In the sciences,
every one has so much as he really knows and com-
prehends. What he believes only, and takes upon
trust, are but shreds, which, however well in the
whole piece, make no considerable addition to his
stock who gathers them. Such borrowed wealth,
like fairy money, though it icere gold in the hand
from ichich he received it, will be but leaves and dust
when it comes to wse." *
Knowledge of various kinds is now diffused over
* Essay on the Human Understanding, book i. c. 4, 23. " So
much," says this great man, " as we ourselves consider and compre-
hend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real and true
knowledge. The floating of other men's opinions in our brains,
makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen, to le
true." Id. ib.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 27
a vast surface; and through indolence, or inability
from various causes, great multitudes are content
with the glittering surface. They may be com-
pared to tourists, crowding eagerly and gaily to
the frontiers, but never even dreaming of pene-
trating into the interior, of Science.
I shall say nothing of the great number of SEK-
MONS AND RELIGIOUS publications, which make their
almost daily appearance, and presumably indicate,
by their continuance, a proportionate demand for
them. For my own part, I rejoice to see religious
truth set forth in every imaginable form and
variety in which it may present itself to devout
and discreet minds ; especially by those who are
trained as our religious teachers, and evince, by
what they write, a due sense of their high and
holy mission, by candour, moderation, sincerity,
and piety. I read, and always did read, largely in
this direction both our old writers of divinity, and
those of our own day *, than whom, I am sure that
none will be readier than themselves to say of their
great predecessors, there were giants in those days.
And of our living divines it may be said with
truth, that they address themselves with great
ability and learning, especially to theological exi-
gencies which did not exist, at least in their pre-
sent form, in the times of their foregoers.
Amiable feelings, and a facility of publishing,
precipitate upon us a sort of deluge of BIOGRAPHY.
28 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
People's " Lives " are now, it is to be feared, writ-
ten too often without the slightest regard to their
pretensions to be distinguished by such posthu-
mous notice ; and I doubt whether this may not
be a secret source of some little that is affected
and factitious in modern individual character. I
mean, whether men, women, and even children, do
not sometimes act and speak with a view to their
little sayings and doings being chronicled in flat-
tering terms after their decease. In truth, there
are very few people indeed, with whose lives and
character any reasonable person can feel the faintest
desire to be made acquainted. When a great
man dies, let his life be written, but let it also be
written greatly. If not at all, or imperfectly, the
age, or the biographer, suffers, and is disgraced ;
for a great memory has been slighted, or degraded.
Take, for instance, the resplendent character of
him whom the nation, with the eyes of all other
nations upon it, so lately buried with reverent
affection.
I witnessed that great burial : and methinks
the scene of solemnity and grandeur rises again
before my eyes. I can conceive nothing more
calculated than was that transcendent spectacle
profoundly to affect the heart and the imagina-
tion of a philosophical beholder. There was to
be seen the chivalry of the world, shedding tears
round a mighty fellow-warrior's coffin, which was
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 29
descending gently for ever from their eyes, amidst
melting melody, into the grave where the worm
is now feeding sweetly* upon all that was mortal,
of Arthur Duke of Wellington. While my tears
fell, in common with all present, including royalty
itself; while music pealed mournfully, dissolving
the very soul, and the gorgeous coroneted coffin
finally disappeared ,f there arose before my mind's
eye a kindred yet different scene the vision
of some pauper burial, simple and rude, occur-
ring perhaps at that very moment : the burial
of some aged" forlorn being, \ whose poverty-
stricken spirit was at length safely housed where
the weary are at rest: the poor dust unattended,
save by those whose duty was to bury it with-
out a sigh, without a tear: ^with no sound but
a reverend voice, and the' gusty air; and no pro-
longed ceremonial. In the world of spirits, both
these might already have met the warrior-states-
man and the pauper, each aware of the different
disposal of the dust he had left behind ! Thus are
we equally unable to evade death, to conceal or
disguise its true and awful character. One event
* Job xxiv. 20.
f- It was very affecting to see the present Duke of Wellington
quietly extend his hand to touch his illustrious father's descending
coffin.
J At the remote village in which Lord Byron lies buried, a friend
of mine recently saw, on a page of the Register, near that which
contained an entry of the noble poet's burial, another thus : "An
old man : a stranger : name unkiwcn."
30 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
happeneth to all.* The word spoken on high, and
great and mean are beside each other in the same
darkness, with the same event before them.
Pardon this digression, for a moment, concern-
ing so great, and so recent an event : one to be wit-
nessed once only not in a lifetime only, but per-
haps in many ages.
To write the life of our immortal Wellington,
to produce a KT^a ael, would worthily occupy
ten, ay, or even twenty years of the life of a
highly-qualified biographer ; to preserve a mighty
individuality, and not lose it amidst glittering
multifariousness of detail. To present Wellington
to posterity, as alone posterity is likely, or
concerned, to look at him, a great effort must
be made to disengage him from, and indeed obli-
terate, all traces of mere circumstance, except
where essentially indicative of idiosyncrasy, how-
ever interesting to contemporaries. His bio-
grapher ought to feel that he is really at present,
and for some time to come, too near the greatness
which has gone from us ; and should, therefore,
strive to place himself at least half a century, or a
century, in advance of the age in which he lives.
But, who now has the patient self-denial, shall I
also say, the leisure to do this ? Is there, indeed,
any encouragement to make the effort? Or does
an indolent and prurient love of gossip vitiate the
* Eccles. ii. 14.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 31
taste of both readers and writers of biography
encouraging the latter to trifle with the memory
of the dead, and the intellect of the living ?
I would recommend any young aspirant to bio-
graphical distinction to read, and meditate upon,
the chief existing models of that delightful and
instructive class of writings models in respect of
the fitting subject, and the strength and beauty
with which that subject is invested by their
writers. Let him then ask himself, Is my subject
worthy of occupying the public attention, likely to
interest posterity ; and, if it be, am I capable of
doing justice to his character and memory ? And
have I the requisite means and opportunity ? I
cannot quit this topic without expressing a thought
which has often occurred to me, that the dead of
our days, could they reappear among us for a mo-
ment, have grievous cause to complain against their
survivors. The instant that those dead have dis-
appeared, almost every act of their life, even of a
private and confidential nature, is formally sub-
mitted to the scrutiny of often a harsh-judging
public, not acquainted with the precise circum-
stances under which those acts were done those
letters, for instance, written which become thence-
forth the subjects of unsparing comment and some-
times injurious speculation ! I have heard an
eminent person say, when conversing on this sub-
ject, "For my part, I now take care to write
32 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
no letters that may not be proclaimed on the
housetops and am very cautious whom I take
into my confidence." Is this unreasonable, or
unnatural ?
Perhaps, however, the most conspicuous feature
of the literature of the age, is to be seen in the
department of PKOSE FICTION. There can be no
difficulty in pointing to the great name of Sir
Walter Scott as one destined, in all probability, to
attract the admiring eyes of distant ages, unless,
indeed, our language fail, or the taste and genius
of future times altogether alter. He was a won-
derful person ; and has left in our imaginative lite-
rature the traces of giant footprints, such as none
dare even attempt to fill. All his contemporaries
and successors, down to the present time, he " doth
bestride, like a Colossus." Of this gre^t genius it
may be proudly said, that he never wrote- a iine
which had the slightest tendency to licentiousness :
and, moreover, that there is not a trace of vulgarity
in any of his often dazzling and enthralling, but not
equal compositions, all of which emanated from the
pen of the highly-finished scholar and gentleman.
This class of writing, for certain reasons of my
own, unimportant to any one else, I feel extreme
delicacy and difficulty in touching, or even glan-
cing at. To criticise contemporaries, and by way
of either censure or praise, is an impertinence of
which, for those reasons, I cannot be guilty ; but I
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 33
may be allowed to express my opinion, that during
the last quarter of a century, undoubted, and high,
and very peculiar genius has been displayed in this
fascinating department of literature. It may, at
the same time, be admissible to express, most re-
spectfully, a suspicion whether, in the opinion of
future competent judges, it would be held that suf-
ficient pains have been taken, in the present day,
to construct a Fiction on a durable basis ; and
whether there are, consequently, many that have
sufficient vitality to bloom in the atmosphere shall
I say it '? of the next succeeding century. It has
always appeared to me, that to construct a durable
Fiction is really a more difficult task, and requires
much more original power, and far greater know-
ledge and taste, time, and consideration, than
seems to be sometimes supposed. Let any one
carefully consider the conception, plan, and execu-
tion, of those three imperishable masterpieces, Don
Quixote, Gil Bias, and Tom Jones ; and I shall be
much mistaken if he will not concur in the obser-
vation which I have ventured to make.
The continuous and even increasing demand for
this class of writings, both in our own country, on
the Continent, and in America, is truly astonishing.
I doubt whether anything of the kind is written,
however humble its pretensions, which is not read
by hundreds ; while those of a higher, and the
highest order, and the productions of persons of
34 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
established reputation, are eagerly read by many
hundreds of thousands of persons, perhaps ulti-
mately by even millions, in almost every class of
society. If this be so, how great is the responsi-
bility cast upon those possessing the power of writ-
ing such works ! What incalculable evil, what
incalculable good, may they not do !
And I do believe that many of the most distin-
guished and successful labourers in this gay crowded
quarter of the literary vineyard, sincerely strive to
make their writings the vehicles of high moral
teaching.
It is, in fact, a class of writing which must always
have charms for mankind : and it may be remarked,
with humble reverence, that the sublime teachings
of Him who spake as never man spake, were largely
conveyed in parables.
The writing of HISTORY finds great favour, and
enjoys unprecedented facilities, in the present age.
Generally speaking, it is in the hands of very able,
learned, and faithful men ; and I doubt whether
history ever spoke so fully and so truthfully as in
the present age. To some extent this is easily to
be accounted for, even independently of the per-
sonal character of our historians ; and principally
by the fact that so many persons now have ample
opportunities for quickly detecting erroneous state-
ments. Authentic political information of every
kind is accessible to almost everybody; and a
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 35
consciousness of this fact naturally quickens the
vigilance of historical writers, especially those
dealing with modern and recent times. The his-
torians of three or four centuries hence will have
immense advantages over their predecessors of the
present and previous ages. There is one history
of the present day, which will present in all future
time a great storehouse of authentic facts, consti-
tuting the record of one of the most critical periods
in the history of civilised mankind.
POETRY is not dead, in the present busy practical
age ; but her voice is heard only faintly and fit-
fully, like the sounds of an jEolian harp in a
crowded thoroughfare. The hurrying passengers
do not hear it, nor would care about it if they did ;
but now and then the sounds from that harp fall
deliciously on a sensitive ear, and awake fine sym-
pathies. The poetry of the present age is principally
and elegantly conversant with sentiment, of which it
is often a very delicate and beautiful utterance. It is
questionable, however, whether flights of imagina-
tion are as bold ; whether it be, or at all events
show itself, as strong and original as in times gone
by. Yet there are grand regions which I have often
greatly wondered to see apparently continuing un-
tried. Oh, transcendent and most glorious faculty,
there are yet boundless scenes into which thou
mayest soar as on angel wing !
There is a fine spirit of CRITICISM abroad; subtle.
36 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
piercing, and discriminating. Specimens of this
species of literature may be seen in our weekly and
even daily journals, as well as in those appearing at
longer intervals compositions which may take their
place beside any extant in the language; and he who
expresses this opinion, has himself been occasionally
the subject of rather rough criticism, which, never-
theless, cannot bias an honest judgment. On the
other hand, there is a very great deal of this class
of writing that is hasty and flimsy, and amounting,
in fact, to a mere caricature of criticism.
Our PHILOSOPHICAL literature is of a very high
order speaking at present as far as regards style
of composition ; and I believe that the most distin-
guished foreigners, acquainted with our language,
express the same opinion. Mr Dugald Stewart, a
very competent judge, and one who himself wrote
English with purity and force, has declared that " as
an instrument of thought, and a medium of scientific
communication, the English language appears to
me, in its present state, to be far superior to the
French." This was said nearly fifty years ago.
Since then, no one can have been familiar with phi-
losophical compositions, especially those of the pre-
sent day, without having occasion to admire the
simplicity, vigour, and precision with which Eng-
lish is written by those communicating the pro-
foundest researches in science. If I may be allowed
to express an opinion, I should select the style of
OF THE PRESEXT AGE. 37
Sir John Herschel as affording a model of elegance,
exactness, and strength. Some of his delineations
of difficult and abstruse matters are exquisitely
delicate and felicitous.
Having thus glanced at the more prominent feat-
ures of the literature of the age, it may be excus-
able to suggest the question, whether, upon the
whole, the present age is, in this respect, inferior,
equal, or superior to any that has preceded it ?
This is a question, indeed, equally applicable to
all the other branches of a subject directly or in-
directly involving the intellectual development
of the age ; but it may nevertheless not be out of
place here for an over-confident observer to cast
his eye on the long roll of splendid names in every
department of science and literature, prose and
poetical, of days preceding our own, and in other
countries as well as our own, and then modestly
to ask, dare we say that we have any to set beside
them? Or is the present age to be regarded as
under peculiar conditions, unfavourable to the de-
velopment of individual eminence and greatness?
Voltaire, an author whose name one can never
mention but with mingled feelings of contempt,
anger, and admiration, once made this remark :
" Original genius occurs but seldom in a nation
where the literary taste is formed. The number of
cultivated minds which there abound, like the trees
in a thick and flourishing forest, prevent any single
38 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
individual from raising his head far above the rest."
But is this so ? And why should it be so ? Would
a Plato, an Aristotle, a Newton, a Bacon, a Locke,
a Liebnitz,* a Shakspeare or a Milton, a Scaliger
or a Bentley, a Cervantes or a Le Sage, a Barrow
or a Butler, a Chatham, a Pitt, a Fox or Burke, fail
to tower above the men of the nineteenth century?
The question may give rise to interesting specula-
tions ; but I shall pass them by with the observa-
tion, that one may, without presumption, venture
to question the soundness of this confident dictum
of Voltaire, who doubtless secretly hoped that he
himself would be regarded as a transcendent ex-
ception to the rule which, possibly for that purpose
alone, he modestly laid down.
Thus much for what may be termed the vehicle
or circulating medium of thought; in discussing
which, it was almost necessary to touch, however
slightly, several of the multifarious subjects with
which it is connected. May I recur to the ques-
tion, Are we of the present day pigmies or giants,
as compared with those who have gone before us?
or whether, taking a large average, we may be
considered as below, or on a level with them V
Let us reserve the matter for a future stage of our
speculations ; and in the mean time try to avoid
a tendency to become, as Horace has expressed it,
* It Wcis the fond object of this great philosophical genius to
subvert the Newtonian system !
OF THE PRESENT AGE.
praisers of the past on the one hand, and, on the
other, confident and vainglorious as to the posi-
tion of intellect in the present age. It may be
that there were giants in those days intellectual
giants in the times before us ; it may be that so
there have always been, and that there are now.
But here may be started an important and inte-
resting question: Is the human intellect now really
different from, or greater than, that which it ever
was, since we have authentically known of its
existence and action ? The stature of mankind is
just what it was three thousand years ago, as is
proved by the examination of mummies : why
should it be different with their minds? The in-
tellect of Newton, La Place, or La Grange, may
stand, says Sir John Herschel,* in fair competi-
tion with that of Archimedes, Aristotle, or Plato.
But is it not also possible, and the question is a
very great one, that the Almighty may have pre-
scribed limits to the human intellect, which it
never could, and never can pass, however it may
have the advantage of dealing with the accumu-
lated riches and experience of all the past intellec-
tual action of our species, as far as its results exist,
for our contemplation and guidance? Or may
there exist dormant energies of the intellect, be-
yond all past, but not incapable of future and pro-
digious, development ?
Disc, on Xat. Phil., p. 40.
40 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
The INTELLECT!' But what is intellect? and
in merely asking the question, we seem suddenly
sinking into a sort of abyss ! Is intellect an un-
known power, like Gravitation, whose existence is
evidenced only by its action, while of the nature
of that power we are utterly in the dark ? Seven
years ago I ventured, in a work incidentally deal-
ing with such topics, to ask the following question :
<{ Metaphysics, or mental philosophy : what shall
be said upon this subject? What do we now
really know of that strange mysterious thing, the
Human Mmd, after thousands of years' ingenious
and profound speculations of philosophers? Has
the Almighty willed that it should be so? that the
nature and operations of the MIND of man, shall
for ever be shrouded in mystery impenetrable, and
that we shall continue at once pleasing, puzzling,
and harassing ourselves, and exercising our highest
faculties to the end of time, with contradictory
speculations and hypotheses?" In this present
month of December, I submitted this passage, for
the purposes of this evening, to two eminent acade-
mical teachers in England and in Scotland, dis-
ciples of different schools, of that which passes
under the name of metaphysics.* One wrote to
me thus : " I can subscribe to the perplexity ex-
* This word is a barbarous compound by the Schoolmen of the
words [T] iMrx. T (fuffiaa., which were used by the editors of tho
extant works of Aristotle, to designate his abstract reasonings and
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 41
pressed about metaphysics, in the separate para-
graph of your letter." The other told me, that he
thought I had indicated the true state of metaphy-
sical science in the present day. Then I asked
him whether he considered that we were really
any further advanced or whether, at least, it was
generally agreed that we were further advanced,
in admitted knowledge of the nature and functions
of the mind, than Aristotle was that is, upwards
of twenty-two centuries ago '? He considered for
a moment, and replied in the negative ! adding,
" We may think that we are, but that is not my
opinion." I then asked the same question of my
other friend, and he wrote as follows : " I am
afraid that very few substantial advances have
been made in psychology, since the days of Aris-
totle. Perhaps more people know something of
the human mind than knew anything about it
in his time; but I doubt whether any man of
the present day knows more about it than he
knew!"
What opinion would Plato and Aristotle form,
of the existing state of metaphysical science in this
country and Germany, if they could rise from their
long sleep to scrutinise it "? On how many great
speculations concerning the original causes of existence, without
relation to matter, and which, they were of opinion, should be
studied " after his Physics," /ar* ?'<*. p.nxit, or treatises on Natural
Philosophy.
42 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
points would they find their philosophical successors
of let us say the last two centuries, agreed? And
on which of them would either Plato or Aristotle
be forced to acknowledge that their own specula-
tions had been subverted by demonstrative strength ?
What new facts and phenomena would be presented
to them in mental science ? Who shall be our
spokesman, of dead or living metaphysicians, from
Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Liebnitz, down
to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel ? What a
ghostly wrangling might we expect to hear ! What
would be the result ? Would the elder disputants
claim the later as disciples; or these prove that
their predecessors had been altogether and ab-
surdly in the wrong?
But, you will reasonably ask, is it, then, really
so ? A few minutes' conversation with the first
professed or acknowledged metaphysician whom
you meet, however he may at first dispute it s will
prove the existence of the fact, that the very
elements of the science at this moment are floating
about in extreme uncertainty. Ask him what he
means by mind? is it material, or immaterial?
What does he understand by matter? does it
exist, or not? Is thought the functional result
of physical organisation, or the action of a sepa-
rate spiritual existence? If so, how is it united
with, or what are its relations to, matter? How
does it stand with relation to the external world ?
OP THE PRESENT AGE. 43
Nay is there any external world at all?* What
is the nature of the mind's internal action ? What
is consciousness? What is perception, and what
are its media? What are ideas? are they, or
are they not, innate ? for this grand question is,
and even in our own country, still the subject of
dispute ! f What constitutes personal identity ?
And so forth : everything proving the more un-
settled the further you push your way into the
darkness and confusion worse confounded than
that out of which you had gone. The distinguished
metaphysician to whom I last alluded, a subtle,
original, and learned thinker, wrote to me thus,
the other day : " The science of the human mind,
as hitherto cultivated, is a poor, unedifying pur-
suit: we seek to isolate the mind from the thinjrs
* Bishop Berkeley, an exquisite metaphysical genius, brought
profound reasonings in support of his opinion, that our belief in the
reality of an external world is totally unfounded !
f- "Innate ideas" signify those'notions, or impressions, supposed
to have been stamped upon the mind from the first instant of its
existence, as contradistinguished to those which it afterwards gra-
dually acquires from without. Locke undertook to demonstrate
that ideas are not innate : and the dispute has the greatest names
arrayed on each side. There is one remark on the subject, made
by Bishop Law, the patron of Dr Paley, and a zealous partisan
of Locke, which has always appeared to me worthy of attention :
" It will really come to the same thing with regard to the usual
attributes of God, and the nature of virtue and vice, whether the
Deity has implanted these instincts and affections in us, or has
framed and disposed us in such a manner has given us such power,
and placed us in such circumstances, that we must necessarily
acquire them." LAW'S Translation of Archbishop King on the
Origin of Evil. P. 79 (note.)
44 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
with which it is occupied the external world, and
to study that mind in its isolation. But that is im-
practicable. We instantly lose our footing. We get
among abstractions, darkness, and nonentity. How
do you know, begins to ask the puzzled inquirer,
that we have a mind at all ? Why cannot a body be
so constituted, as to think, and feel, and love, and
hate? He is perhaps answered, that the opinion
in favour of a MIND (you know that I am a zealous
anti-materialist) is at any rate more probable.
The science of the human mind, then, according to
this, is the science of something which only 2)robably
exists ! A fine science that must be, which deals
with something which perhaps does not exist ! "
Here is a picture of existing metaphysical
science ! It is, in truth, only a reflexion of some
of the myriad dark shadows of all past speculation ;
and shall it be said that it bears a similar relation
to the future ? Metaphysics are called a science ;
and yet its main questions are " What are the
questions!" It deals with being, and its condi-
tions, and yet cannot say what being is : and, in-
deed, I doubt whether it can be truly given credit
for possessing one single grand truth, universally
recognised as such. In short, metaphysics are to
each particular mind what it chooses to make
them ; though undoubtedly these exercitations have
a tendency to sharpen its faculties. A whole life
of an ingenious rational being may be occupied in
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 45
these pursuits however irritating it may be to fond
metaphysicians to be told so without the acknow-
ledged acquisition of a single fact, of one solitary,
practical, substantial result. He has been doing, all
the while, little else than amusing himself with a sort
of mental kaleidoscope, or gazing at a series of dis-
solving views. He has been floundering on from
beginnings in which nothing is begun, to conclu-
sions in which nothing is concluded !
It would seem, however, that new forces are
now being brought into the field, and magnetism
and electricity, whether one and the same force,
or different, are destined to dissolve our diffi-
culties. According to one quasi philosopher, man's
body is a magnet, * mysteriously communicating
* " Mesmer," says Tennemann, in his Manual of the History
of Philosophy, " discovered, or rather re-discovered, the exis-
tence of a new force a universally diffused power, similar to
attraction and electricity, permeating and acting on all organised
and unorganised bodies." Some view it simply as " a nervous
fluid ;" while others resolve certain recent alleged phenomena
of natural and artificial somnambulism, to " the power of the
mind acting directly on the organisation : " whence we have lately
heard of "two new sciences Neuro-Hypnology, and Electro-
Biology." Professor Eschenmayer admits the existence of "an
organic ether," spread everywhere, and subtler than light ; and
with this view "connects his mystical and spiritual metaphysics."
Dr Passavant " shows the intimate and important relation be-
tween the science and the subliinest sentiments of religion!" and
Dr Ennemoser can trace " the connection and distinction of the
highest degree of Mesmerism, and Miracles !" What will be
said of these things, a few centuries hence '{ Shall we be laughed at
for laughing at them if our age do laugh at them ? Or does a dis-
criminating philosophy detect in action, amidst a mass of absurdity,
and even fraud, startling indications of physical truth ?
46 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
with other bodies, and external objects, without
any visible medium ; and this discovery is destined,
say the professors of the new science, to cast a
new light on the nature of being, of life, death,
sleep, spirit, matter and theology ! Apparently
one of our own countrymen has anonymously
announced the exhilarating discovery, that man is
a mere electro-chemical machine, in common with
all the lower animals, of what sort or size whatso-
ever !* " The mental action," quoth this sage, " is
identical, except in degree : it may be imponderable
and intangible the result of the action of an appara-
tus of an electric nature " I am quoting his words
" a modification of that surprising agent which
takes magnetism, heat, and light, as other subordi-
nate forms: electricity being almost as metaphysical
as ever mind was supposed to be. ... Mental action
passes at once into the category of natural things ;
its old metaphysical character vanishes in a moment,
and the distinction between physical and moral is
annulled." There is a stride indeed ! the stride,
to be sure, of an impudent child. According to him,
my friends, we in this room may behold in our-
* " If mental action be electric," says the anonymous and very
quaint writer alluded to the author of The Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation, "the proverbial quickness of thought that is,
the quickness of the transmission of sensation and will may be
presumed to have been brought to an exact admeasurement ! . . .
Mental action may accordingly be presumed to have a rapidity
equal to 192,000 miles in the second ! i. e., the quickness with
which the electric agent, light, travels ! "
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 47
selves a choice assortment of electrical machines
quaintly conceiving themselves responsible beings !
I, giving out the sparks, chemically or mechani-
cally I do not exactly know or care which and
you looking on and listening to their crackling
sound, with electrical sympathy and complacency !
What will be the next stage of this wondrous de-
velopment? It is hard to treat these things gravely ;
yet they have been, and are, widely and sedulously
disseminated in the present day, in this country
in this, the nineteenth century ! With what object?
And what measure must have been taken, by those
who do so, of the intellect of the age ?
How refreshing is it, to recollect, amidst all
these results of never-ending, and often impious
trifling with the grandest subjects with which man
can concern himself, the sublime and authoritative
declaration of Holy Scripture, There is a SPIRIT
in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth
them understanding ! *
What, therefore, shall we conclude? That MIND
remains, at present, whatever revelations may be
in store for future times, the great insoluble mys-
tery it ever was, so far as relates to its constitution
and mode of action ? That we have no evidence
of its faculties being greater, or less, now, than
they ever were; and that, judging merely from the
past, we have no grounds for expecting alteration
* Job xxxii. 8.
43 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
for the future? It may be, that such knowledge is
too high for us, and that for wise purposes we can-
not attain to it, and that the absence of it does not
affect the object .with which man was placed upon
the earth. I am myself strongly disposed to think
that every person who has meditated upon the
operations of his own mind, has occasionally, and
suddenly, been startled with a notion that his mind
possesses qualities and attributes of which he has
nowhere seen any account. I do not know how
to express it, but I have several times had a tran-
sient consciousness of mere ordinary incidents
then occurring, having somehow or other hap-
pened before, accompanied by a vanishing idea
of being able even to predict the sequence. I
once mentioned this to a man of powerful intel-
lect, and he said, " So have I/" Again it may
be that there is more of truth than one suspects,
in the assertion which I met with in a work of
Mr de Quincey's, that forgetting absolute forget-
ting is a thing not possible to the human mind.
Some evidence of this may be derived from the
fact of long-missed incidents and states of feel-
ing suddenly being reproduced, and without any
perceptible train of association. Were this to be
so, the idea is very awful ; and it has been sug-
gested by a great thinker, that merely perfect
memory of everything, may constitute the great
book which shall be opened in the last day, on which
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 49
mail lias been distinctly told that the secrets of all
hearts shall be made known ; for all things are
naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom
ice have to do*
Man's mind, I must take the liberty of repeat-
ing, is indeed a mystery to him. In the mean
time, let restless metaphysical speculators go on, if
they please, amusing and puzzling each other with
theories and hypotheses to the end of time ; only,
my friends, let not ourselves be drawn within their
meshes, but consider whether life, thought, and the
sense of responsibility, have not been given to us
for infinitely wiser and greater purposes, however
awfully mysterious, than to exhaust our faculties in
endless and nugatory inquiries. Investigations of
this kind, nevertheless, are not in all points of view
to be deprecated, but may possibly be attended with
morally beneficial results. "It is of great use to the
sailor," says Locke, " to know the length of his line,
though he cannot, with it, fathom all the depths of
the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough
to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary
to direct his voyage, and caution him against run-
ning upon shoals, that may ruin him. Our business
here is to know, not all things, but those which
concern our conduct. If we can find out those
measures whereby a rational creature, put in that
state in which man is in this world, may, and
Heb. iv. 13.
D
50 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
ought, to govern his opinions and actions depend-
ing thereon, we need not be troubled that some
other things escape our knowledge."* And,
finally, be it observed, that we have no authority
from revealed religion, for repressing what are
called metaphysical speculations, however little
direct encouragement it may afford them; and
even if their result be only to prove their futility,
that, of itself, constitutes a signal fact.
It will be observed that I have been hitherto
dealing with the so-called science of the mind,
simply as the subject of human speculation. How
REVELATION deals with man, physically, mentally,
and morally, remains to be seen. Contenting our-
selves for the present, with the undoubted existence
of intellect, and its action, somehow or other ; and
postponing the consideration of the cognate subject
of ethics, or moral science, it may not possibly be
* Essay on the Human Understanding, book i. chap. i. 6. A
little further on, this profound thinker thus admirably proceeds :
" Men extending their inquiries beyond their capacities, and letting
their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no
sure footing, it is no wonder that they raise questions, and multiply
disputes ; which never coming to any clear resolution, are proper
only to continue and increase their doubts, and to confirm them at
last in perfect scepticism. Whereas, were the capacities of our
understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once
discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between
the enlightened and dark parts of things ; between what is, and
what is not, comprehensible by us, men would perhaps, with less
scruple, acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ
their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction
in the other.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 51
deemed presumptuous if one venture to express an
opinion, that the intellect of the present age appears,
cceteris paribus, in as high a state of general deve-
lopment as has been known on the earth ; and that
it may even be doubted whether there be not now
among us I speak of ourselves and other civilised
nations men of an intellectual strength approach-
ing that of the most illustrious of our recorded
species. But in saying this, I rely only on the
evidence afforded by the recent progress and the
present state of physical science. If we have made,
as I feel compelled to think is the case, no real
advance in psychological science for ages, how vast
has been that of physical science, within the last
half, or even quarter of a century !
Go back for a moment, in imagination, to the
times when this earth was thought the fixed centre
of the universe and an extended plain,* the
heavenly bodies mere glittering specks revolving
round it ! when Thales, a great philosopher, one
of the seven wise men of Greece, conceived amber
to have an inherent soul or essence, which, awakened
by friction, went forth and brought back the light
particles floating around (such were his ideas of
* This notion is not yet apparently banished from among our-
selves even. " I remember," says the present Astronomer-Royal,
" a man in my youth my friend was in his inquiries an ingenious
man, a sort of philosopher who used to say he should like to go to
the edge of the earth and look over 1" Aireift Lectures on Astro-
nomy, p. 46, 2d edit., 1848.
52 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
its electrical qualities!) when the great Aristotle
taught that the heavenly bodies were bound fast in
spheres which revolved with them round our earth
the bodies themselves being motionless the first
sphere being that in which the fixed stars are placed ;
then the five planets ; the sun ; and, next to the
earth, the moon : the earth itself being at rest, and
the centre of the universe ! But time would fail
me to recapitulate these marks of what we call pri-
mitive simplicity ; and your memories will quickly
suggest them, far lower down than to the times of
astrology and alchemy. How stand we now V
Little though we know, by our own research and
reasonings, concerning our own inner man, what
have we not come to know of the world in which we
live, and our physical relations to it 5 of the wonder-
ful structures of ourselves, animals, and vegetables ;
of the glorious heavens around and about us ? Man
is indeed a wonder to himself, and lives amidst an
incomprehensible and ever-increasing wonder. Let
us merely glance, for a moment, at one or two of
the leading features of modern physiology, of che-
mistry, mechanics, astronomy, and geology.
The whole earth has been converted into man's
observatory ; in every part of which he is inces-
santly, simultaneously, and systematically at work,
aud communicating, and comparing, each with the
other, their results. What would Aristotle say,
Lord Bacon standing by with gladdened heart,
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 53
were he to be told of the astronomical, geological,
magnetic, and physiological observations, researches,
and experiments at this moment going on in every
quarter of the globe to which adventurous man can
penetrate ; observations and experiments conducted
by those who act strictly in concert, and in rigorous
adherence to universally recognised rules and prin-
ciples of inquiry and experiment? That the greatest
intellects of the age are ever at work, patiently
methodising, combining, and comparing, the results
thus obtained, and deducing from them inferences
of the last importance '? What relation do ages of
our past history bear to a single year thus spent ?
We have thoroughly dissected, for instance, the
human and almost all known animal structures
those of the present tenants of every element ; cor-
recting innumerable errors, and developing exten-
sive and important relations and analogies. The
result is, to overwhelm, and almost crush our small
faculties with the evidences of transcendent wisdom
and beneficence. The subdued soul can only mur-
mur, Marvellous are Thy worlcSj and that my soul
knoweth right well !
A word about anatomy, human and compara-
tive, with reference to some recently promulgated
conclusions of deep significance and interest.
The human structure seems to have been nearly
exhausted anatomically, even as far as relates to
the nerves, except, perhaps, as to microscopical
54 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
researches, now being actively prosecuted, and
with very important results. This remark, how-
ever, applies only to the facts of human anatomy :
on the significance or meaning of those facts, quite
a new light seems dawning. Man now, by his
own researches, finds that he is indeed, as God had
ages before told him, fearfully and wonderfully
made; and the enlightened and pious philosophy
of the present day recognises as a fact, on the
authority of revelation, which has recorded it in
language of ineffable awe and sublimity, that the
human species came upon this planet solely in virtue
of a direct act of creation by the Almighty. God
created man in His own image in the image of
God created he him. And the Lord God formed
man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living
soul. " He did not merely possess it," observes
Mr Coleridge ; " he became it. It was his proper
being; his truest self; the man in the man. All
organised beings have life, in common, each after
its kind. This, therefore, all animals possess,
and man as an animal. But in addition to this,
God transfused into man a higher gift, and spe-
cially imbreathed even a living that is, self-sub-
sisting soul; a soul having its life in itself."*
Philosophy reverently owns that it knows of no
other clue to beginnings, than that thus vouchsafed
* A ids to Reflection. Introd. Aphorisms, ix.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 55
exclusively and positively by revelation. In ex-
amining the human structure, however, and com-
paring it with that of animals in general, a new
and grand evidence has lately been afforded of the
unity of the divine action ; supplying the last argu-
ment required, and left untouched by the famous
Cudworth, to refute the old atheistic doctrine of
Democritus and his followers who, it will be re-
membered, resolved the existence of men and ani-
mals into the fortuitous concourse of atoms by
demonstrating the existence, in the Divine Mind, of
a pattern, or plan, prior to its manifestation in the
creation of man. " The evidence," says the great
physiologist, to whom we are indebted * for this
noble contribution to science and natural theology
I mean Professor Owen, who I believe has carried
comparative anatomy much beyond the point at
which it had been left by his illustrious predecessor
Cuvier "the evidence of unity of plan in the struc-
ture of animals, testifies to the oneness of their
Creator, as the modifications of the plan for differ-
ent. modes of life, illustrate the beneficence of the
designer." Human anatomy has thus acquired a
new interest and significance. Man is no longer
regarded as though he were distinct in his anatomy
from all the rest of the animal creation ; but his
structure is perceived to be an exquisite modifica-
* See The Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton,
and On the Nature of Limit. By Richard Owen, F.R.S. 8vo.
56 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
tion of many other structures, the whole of which
have now been recognised as modifications of one
and the same general pattern. Every one of the
two hundred and sixty bones which may be enu-
merated in the human skeleton, can be unerringly
traced in the skeletons of many hundred inferior
animals ; and the human anatomist of our day be-
gins to comprehend the nature of his own structure,
in a way never dreamed of by his predecessors.
Thus, as it appears to me, is supplied a splendid
addition to the treasures of natural theology.
" Of the unity of the Deity," says Paley,* " the
proof is the uniformity of plan observable in the
system." And let me interpose the remark, that
every day is accumulating upon us proofs of this
sublime doctrine.
" "We never get amongst such original, or
totally different modes of existence, as to indicate
that we are come into the province of a different
creator, or under the direction of a different will.
. . . The inspection and comparison of living
forms add to the argument without number." And
that, in some respects, incomparable writer pro-
ceeds to instance a series of similitudes between all
animals, which " surely bespeak the same creation
and the same creator." Thus wrote Paley just
half a century ago in 1802 : had he been now
living, how he would have hailed this discovery of
* Natural Theology, chap, xxv. '' Of the Unity of the Deity."
OF THE PRESENT ACE. 57
Owen, in this our own day ! I am aware that,
when it was first announced, suspicions were for a
moment entertained, in one or two quarters, that
it tended to afford a colour to what had been called
the " Theory of Development"* of which I have
reason to know that there is no more determined
opponent than Professor Owen himself that is,
that during an endless succession of ages, one class
of animals was " developed" from another. I have
thought much, as far as I am able, about this
matter, and own that I see not the slightest
grounds for connecting a real and great discovery
with a preposterous theory such as I believe no
living philosopher of the slightest note would ven-
ture to stamp with the sanction of his authority ;
and even he or they, if there be more than one
concerned, who have vamped up " The Vestiges
of Creation," have never ventured to affix their
names to the performance. There is not, indeed,
a tittle of evidence to support the derogatory
* In Mr Hugh Miller's Old Red Sandstone, a charming little
record of his own interesting and valuable contributions to geolo-
gical science, will be found some just and contemptuous observa-
tions on the Theory of Development, chap. iii. In speaking of
Lamarck, the whimsical author, if so he may be regarded, of this
same theory, Mr Miller drolly observes " Lamarck himself, when
bringing home in triumph the skeleton of some huge salamander
or crocodile of the lias, might indulge consistently with his theory
in the pleasing belief that he had possessed himself of the bones of
his grandfather a grandfather removed, of course, to a remote
degree of consanguinity, by the intervention of a few hundred
thousand ' great-greats.' "
58 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
notion that man is the result of a change gradu-
ally brought about in any inferior animal. It
is simply a gratuitous absurdity a repetition of
one' long exploded that animals, when placed in
new circumstances, alter, and are then capable of
propagating such alteration ; that if new circum-
stances be only given time enough to operate, the
changes may be such as to constitute a new series !
This old nonsense has been recently revived and
spuriously decked out with the spoils of modern
science, so as to arrest the attention of the simple
for a moment ; only, however, to be quickly re-
pudiated by even them, and then again forgotten,
but doubtless to be again reproduced out of the
" Limbo large and broad, since called,
The Paradise of Fools," *
when the exposure of its absurdity has been for-
gotten reproduced as one of the persevering but
abortive efforts of infidelity, to subvert the founda-
tions of morality, social order, a future state, and
the belief of a personal superintending Deity go-
verning his creatures with reference to it.
I cannot quit this branch of the subject without
bringing before you a recent, and a most interest-
ing and splendid illustration of the pitch to which
comparative anatomy has reached in this country
one which renders its conclusions absolutely inevi-
table. The incident which I am about to mention
* Paradise Lost, book iii.
OF THE PRESENT AGE.
exhibits the result of an immense induction of par-
ticulars in this noble science, and bears no faint
analogy to the magnificent astronomical calcula-
tion, or prediction, whichever one may call it,
presently to be laid before you.
Let it be premised, that Cuvier, the late illus-
trious French physiologist and comparative anato-
mist, had said, that in order to deduce from a single
fragment of its structure, the entire animal, it was
necessary to have a tooth, or an entire articulated
extremity. In his time, the comparison was limited
to the external configuration of bone. The study
of the internal structure had not proceeded so far.
In the year 1839, Professor Owen was sitting
alone in his study, when a shabbily-dressed man
made his appearance, announcing that he had got
a great curiosity which he had brought from New
Zealand, and wished to dispose of it to him. Any
one in London can now see the article in question,
for it is deposited in the Museum of the College
of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It has the
appearance of an old marrow-bone, about six inches
in length, and rather more than two inches in
thickness, with loth extremities broken off ; and
Professor Owen considered, that to whatever ani-
mal it might have belonged, the fragment must
have lain in the earth for centuries. At first he
considered this same marrow-bone to have be-
longed to an ox at all events to a quadruped ;
60 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
for the wall or rim of the bone was six times as
thick as the bone of any bird, even the ostrich.
He compared it with the bones in the skeleton of
an ox, a horse, a camel, a tapir and every quad-
ruped apparently possessing a bone of that size and
configuration ; but it corresponded with none. On
this he very narrowly examined the surface of the
bony rim, and at length became satisfied that
this monstrous fragment must have belonged to
a bird ! to one at least as large as an ostrich,
but of a totally different species ; and consequently
one never before heard of, as an ostrich was by far
the biggest bird known. From the difference in
the strength of the bone, the ostrich being unable
to fly, so must have been unable this unknown
bird : and so our anatomist came to the conclusion
that this old shapeless bone indicated the former
existence, in New Zealand, of some huge bird, at
least as great as an ostrich, but of a far heavier
and more sluggish kind. Professor Owen was
confident* of the validity of his conclusions, but
could communicate that confidence to no one else ;
and notwithstanding attempts to dissuade him from
committing his views to the public, he printed his
deductions in the Transactions of the Zoological
Society for the year 1839, where fortunately they
* The paper on which he even sketched the outline of the un-
known bird, is now in the hands of an accomplished naturalist in
London Mr Broderip.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 61
remain on record as conclusive evidence of the fact
of his having then made this guess, so to speak,
in the dark. He caused the bone, however, to be
engraved ; and having sent a hundred copies of
the engraving to New Zealand, in the hopes of
their being distributed and leading to interesting
results, he patiently waited for three years viz.,
till the year 1842 when he received intelligence
from Dr Buckland, at Oxford, that a great box,
just arrived from New Zealand, consigned to him-
self, was on its way, unopened, to Professor Owen ;
who found it filled with bones, palpably of a bird,
one of which was three feet in length, and much
more than double the size of any bone in the
ostrich ! And out of the contents of this box the
Professor was positively enabled to articulate almost
the entire skeleton of a huge wingless bird, between
TEN AND ELEVEN FEET in height, its bony struc-
ture in strict conformity with the fragment in
question ; and that skeleton may be at any time
seen at the Museum of the College of Surgeons,
towering over, and nearly twice the height of the
skeleton of an ostrich ; and at its feet is lying the
old bone from which alone consummate anatomical
science had deduced such an astounding reality : the
existence of an enormous extinct creature of the
bird kind, in an island where previously no bird
had been known to exist larger than a pheasant or
a common fowl !
C2 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
In the vast and deeply interesting department
of human knowledge, however, of which I am
speaking, the eager inquirer is sternly stopped, as
by a voice saying, " Hitherto shalt thou come, and
no further;" and he is fain to obey. As the meta-
physician is unable to tell us what constitutes the
mind, so it is with the physiologist, with reference
to LIFE. His most rigorous analyses have totally
failed to detect what is the precise nature of that
mysterious force, if one may use the word, which
we designate by the word " Life ! " He sees its
infinitely varied modes of existence and action ;
but what it is that so exists and acts, is now as
completely hidden from the highly-trained eye of
the modern physiologist, as it was from the keen
and eager eye of Aristotle. We cannot even con-
jecture its nature; except, perhaps, by vaguely sug-
gesting electricity, magnetism, galvanism, or some
such modification of ethereal force ; while the high
philosophy of this age regards all these as being
only agents used as subtler media for manifesting
the phenomena of life than flesh and bone, but
not a whit more life than they. Language has
been exhausted in attempting to express the vari-
ous notions of it which have occurred to the pro-
foundest of mankind. Thus Newton knew nothing
of what constituted gravitation, but could tell only
the laws which regulated its action. Nor, to recur
for a moment to a topic already touched, do we
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 63
know, nor are we able to conjecture, how the soul
of man exists in conjunction with his body. That
it has, however, a separate, independent, imma-
terial existence, being as distinct from the body
as is the house from its inhabitant, and is not the
mere result of physical functions or forces, but
endued with the precious and glorious gift of im-
mortality, I suppose no one doubts, who wishes to
be considered a believer in the Christian religion,
or to rank as a Christian philosopher. The doc-
trine of materialism is not now that of the philoso-
phical world ; and I think that the number of vota-
ries of that doctrine, never great, is fast declining.
The philosophy of the present age does not pretend
to see anything impossible, or unreasonable, in the
soul's absolute independence of the body, with
which it is so incomprehensibly united, and from
which it so mysteriously takes its departure. I
again repeat, that at present I am dealing with the
matter as one of only human speculation. And as
man has hitherto been baffled in all his attempts to
discover the nature of life, so has it been with him
in respect of death. The awful question of the
Almighty himself to Job remains unanswered
Have the gates of death been opened unto thee ? or
hast thou seen the doors of the shadoic of death ?
Is it, however, permissible to imagine some fu-
ture NEWTON of physiology or chemistry, or both
united, consciously on the verge of solving the tre-
64 INTELLECTUAL AM) MORAL DEVELOPMENT
mendous problem, what constitutes LIFE ? agi-
tated as Newton was w T ben approaching the disco-
very of gravitation, but persevering, till at length
the awful mystery lies exposed to his trembling
eye ! The vitality of all human, animal, and vege-
table existence, in all its modes and conditions, as
absolutely demonstrable as any physical fact at
present cognisable by the sense and understanding
of man ! One's mind falters at the contemplation.
And what might be the effect, on the being of
mankind, of so stupendous a discovery? With
what powers would they become thenceforth in-
vested? And is the other great question the
mind, its real nature and relations to the body
also to be in like manner settled? and man's
relations to the dread future in some measure per-
ceptible even while in this life ? It is easy to ask ;
but what mortal shall answer? even centuries upon
centuries hence, if so long last the state of things
with which man is concerned ! Let us, then,
humbly return to the point from which we started.
And we may hear the profound comparative
anatomist of this our enlightened day, in surveying
constantly accumulating proofs each indicating,
in every direction, the endlessness of omnipotent
resources, and of the wisdom and goodness of the
ever-blessed Creator exclaim, in the sublime lan-
guage of Scripture, placed on record more than
four thousand years ago : Ask now (he BEASTS, and
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 65
they shall teach thee ; and the FOWLS of the air, and
they shall tell thee. Or speak to the EARTH, and it
shall teach thee ; and the FISHES of the sea shall de-
clare unto thee : Who knoweth not in all these, that
the hand of the Lord hath wrought this, in whose
hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath
of all mankind.*
The generation and use of mechanical power will
ever distinguish the age in which we live, not only
when tested by its astonishing practical and daily-
developing results, but when referred to the mental
energy which has led the way to them. " Almost
all the great combinations of modern mechanism,"
says Sir John Herschel, " and many of its refine-
ments and nicer improvements, are creations of
pure intellect, grounding its exertions upon a mode-
rate number of very elementary propositions in
theoretical mechanics and geometry." " On this
head," he justly adds, u not volumes merely, but
libraries, are requisite to enumerate and describe
the prodigies of ingenuity which have been lavished
on everything connected with machinery and engi-
neering.'^ Which of us that saw that true wonder
of our time, that visible and profoundly sugges-
tive epitome and sum of man's doings since he was
placed on this planet, the Great Exhibition of
1851 a spectacle, however, apparently passing
* Job x. 7-10.
\ Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, pp. C3, 64.
66 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
out of the public mind without having had its true
significance adequately appreciated would not re-
cognise as one, but still only one, and a minor, yet
resplendent feature, its rich array of evidences of the
truth of these remarks ? There, mechanical power
was seen in every known form of manifestation and
application, as it is in action at this moment, " dif-
fusing over the whole earth," to quote again this
distinguished philosopher, " the productions of any
part of it ; to fill every corner of it with miracles
of art and labour, in exchange for its peculiar com-
modities ; and to concentrate around us, in our
dwellings, apparel, and utensils, the skill of all who
in the present and past generations have contri-
buted their improvements to the processes of our
manufacture. 11 *
Who is not, so to speak, dumb with wonder
when he contemplates the agency of STEAM and
ELECTRICITY ? which may really be said to have
altered, within a very few years, and to be every
hour altering, the relations of man to his fellow-
creatures and towards external nature giving him
a power over the elements, such as no human intel-
lect in any age, in its boldest flights of specu-
lation, ever even dreamed of his being able to
acquire ? Whatever may be the nature of that
subtle, inscrutable, all -pervading force, which
presents many of its effects to us under the various
* Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, p. 64.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 67
names of Electricity, Magnetism, Galvanism
Electro-magnetism, and Magneto-electricity ; and
whatever its hidden, or at all events indeterminate
relations to light, heat, motion, and chemical affi-
nity or whether these, or any of them, are dis-
tinct affections of matter, correlative, and having a
reciprocal dependence* it is certain that our great
chemists, both at home and abroad, with Fara-
day at their head, are patiently prosecuting pro-
found researches, which have already been at-
tended with splendid results, and justify us in
believing that we are almost on the threshold of
some immense discovery, affecting not only our
whole system of physical science, but the social
interests of mankind. " The agents of nature,"
said Sir John Herschel, some twenty years ago,
" elude direct observation, and become known to
us only by their effects. It is in vain, therefore,
that we desire to become witnesses to the processes
carried on with such means, and to be admitted
into the secret recesses and laboratories where they
are effected."! How far God may permit the keen
eye of man now to penetrate into these arcana of
creation, who shall say?
Look at the beautiful and practical uses to which
we are already able to put these mystic forces or
* GROVE On the Correlations of Physical Forces ; and AXSTED'S
Elementary Course of Otology .
f Disc. Nat. Phil., p. 191.
68 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
elements Light, and Electricity. By the assist-
ance of the latter, we may be said to have vastly
altered our relation to both Time and Space. Let
us look for a moment to the past, and then to the
future. To the past, when mankind could com-
municate together orally only, and no further than
voices could carry ; then, as far and as fast as writ-
ing and mechanical means of transit could convey ;
but now, how is it ? Our converse with each other
is literally with lightning swiftness 5 under ocean,*
through the air; from one person unseen to an-
other unseen ; in different latitudes and longi-
tudes ; and, ere long, in different hemispheres !
The land is rapidly being covered with a network
of electric apparatus for the transmission of thought.
We already communicate with ease, under the sea,
with Ireland and France ! The whole Continent is
now nearly connected thus together. I myself, in
September last, saw the electric telegraph in process
of traversing the Alpine altitudes and solitudes, and
could not help often pausing to think how soon
those filmy conductors might be transmitting words
pregnant with the fate of nations ! Then I thought
of one of the earliest uses to which the electric tele-
* Messages can now be interchanged by the submarine telegraph,
between London and Paris, in thirty or forty minutes : why need it
require a fourth of the time ? I am told, on high authority, that it
is hoped shortly to have the observatories of Paris and Greenwich
in absolutely simultaneous action ! Arago has recently stated that
the only hindrances at present existing are of a temporary and
local nature, in this countiy.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 69
graph was put in this country ; when the murderer's
flight from the still- quivering victim of his fiendish
passion, was long anticipated by the dread conduc-
tors along the line by which he was swiftly travel-
ling in fancied impunity, but only to drop, affright-
ed, into the arms of sternly expectant justice.*
What, again, may not by and by be the fruits
of our present extensive and unremitting researches
on the grand subject of terrestrial magnetism,t and
* The murderer Tawell.
f- It was, I believe, our countryman, Roger Bacon, who nearly
six centuries ago first discovered the property of the magnet in
pointing to the North Pole. Mr Faraday, our illustrious living
countryman, has recently made a discovery in magnetism which
has been pronounced " beyond doubt the most important contribu-
tion physical science has received since the discoveries of Newton
concerning the law of force in gravitation, and the usual action of
that force." It is, that those substances which the magnet cannot
attract it repels: and whilst those which it does attract arrange
themselves parallel to the magnetic axis, those which it repels ar-
range themselves exactly across it that is, at right angles in an
equatorial direction. This is the great governing law above referred
to by Mr Ansted, and in terms by no means exaggerated. Since
this paper was read, Mr Faraday announced, in his deeply interest-
ing Lecture at the Royal Institution, on the 21st January 1853, the
results of a long series of recent nice magnetic experiments by him-
self, establishing that the doctrine hitherto received, as to the action
of the magnetic force, cannot be true. These results prove in only
apparent inconsistence with those obtained by the eminent German
chemist, Plucker that, of two or more different bodies, the most
diamagnetic is more so, in relation to the others, at increasing dis-
tances from the magnet. The observations of both Faraday and
Plucker disprove the law of magnetic actions being inversely as the
square of the distance. That there is a magnetic relation between
the Earth and the Sun, Mr Faraday demonstrated by the remark-
able fact, that there is an exact coincidence between the variation
of the Sun's spots, and that of the Earth's magnetism a decennial
change, the existence of which had been established by Colonel
70 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
its connection with the influence of the sun? Is it
impossible, is it unreasonable, is it in any way un-
philosophical, to conceive that in time there may
be established new relations, of an amazing charac-
ter, between our own planet and the starry system
around it ? I asked this question, the other day,
of a distinguished philosopher, and he answered that
such speculations were by no means visionary.
Let us pause for a moment only, to contemplate
man with his two wondrous instruments the
microscope and the telescope of which he has
been in possession but two centuries, yet what has
he not discovered by them ? By their aid he stands
trembling, astounded, between TWO INFINITUDES !
beholding, in the language of a gifted French-
woman, a world in every atom, a system in every
star ! * His soul is dissolved in awe, as though he
had been admitted for a moment near the presence
of the Almighty Maker of the universe. His
faculties are confounded, alike by contemplating
the vast and the minute. Distributed everywhere
throughout the world, in every element, in the
internal moisture of living plants and animal bodies,
carried about in the vapour and dust of the whole
Sabine, in conformity with the results of careful observation made
by MM. Schwabe and Lamart, on the corresponding variations of
the Sun's spots and the magnetic needle.
* Madame de Stael. " Chaque rnonde peut-etre n'est qu'une
atome, et chaque atome est une moude." See also HEESCHEL'S
Disc, on Nat. Phil. 315.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 71
atmosphere of the earth, exists a mysterious and
infinite kingdom * of living creatures, of whose
existence man had never dreamed till within the last
two centuries, when his senses were so prodigiously
assisted by the microscope ! He now beholds, as I
and many of us have beheld, a single drop of water
instinct with visible, moving, active ay, and evi-
dently happy life, myriad-formed every individual
consummately organised by our own omniscient
Maker ! Within the space of a single grain of
mustard-seed may be witnessed eight millions of
living beings, each richly endowed with the organs
and faculties of animal life ! Many of them, more-
over, are beautiful exceedingly, and of perfect
symmetry and proportion. " Who can behold,"
says an eminent living microscopist, (Mr Prichard,)
" these hollow living globes, revolving and dis-
porting themselves in their native elements with as
much liberty and pleasure as the mightiest monster
in the deep nay, a series of such globes, one
within the other, alike inhabited, and their inhabi-
tants alike participating in the same enjoyment
and not exclaim with the Psalmist : ' How won-
derful are thy works, O Lord ! sought out by all
them that have pleasure therein ! ' " t When we
attempt to fix our faculties on such objects as these,
we are apt to lose the control over them, and to
become powerless amidst conflicting conditions of
* PBICHARD on Infusoria, pp. 1, 2 ; edit. 1852. f Hid, p. 2.
72 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
wonder and perplexity. What are the purposes
of all these stupendous acts of creation, preserva-
tion, and incessant reproduction? And why is
man permitted, and thus late in his history, these
tremulous glances into infinity? The more he
sees, the more assured he becomes, that what he
sees must be absolutely as nothing to what he might
see, were his faculties only a very little increased in
strength. " Every secret which is disclosed, every
discovery which is made, every new effect which is
brought to view, serves to convince us of number-
less more which remain concealed, and which we had
before no suspicion of." * What has now become
of our former notions of the minute? I cannot
answer for others ; but the states of mind into which
the contemplation of these subjects has often thrown
me, is beyond the power of description. " In
wonder," finely observes Mr Coleridge, " all philo-
sophy began ; in wonder it ends ; and admiration
fills up the interspace. But the first wonder is
the offspring of ignorance ; the last is the parent
of adoration. The first is the birth-throe of our
knowledge ; the last is its euthanasy and apo-
theosis" f
But what language is brilliant or strong enough
* Bishop BUTLER, Sermon xv. Upon tie Ignorance of Man.
t Aids to Reflection, Aphorism ix. p. 178, edit. 1843. The apho-
rism is followed by a brief series of profound and instructive reflec-
tions, headed Sequelae, or Thoughts suggested l>y the preceding Apho-
rism,
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 73
to afford the faintest conception of man's discoveries
in the heavens by means of his telescope, and the
transcendent exertions of his intellect which it has
called forth ? Let us see if we can indicate a few
results, and a very very few only, in these radiant
regions.
To our naked eye are displayed, 1 believe, about
three thousand stars, down to the sixth magnitude;
and of these, only twenty are of the first, and seventy
of the second magnitude. Thus far, the Heavens
were the same to the ancients as they are to our-
selves. But within the last two centuries our tele-
scopes have revealed to us countless millions of stars,
more and more astonishingly numerous, the farther
we are enabled to penetrate into space ! Every in-
crease, says Sir John Herschel, in the dimensions
and power of instruments, which successive improve-
ments in optical science have attained, has brought
into view multitudes innumerable of objects invisible
before ; so that, for anything experience has hither-
to taught us, the number of the stars may be really
infinite, in the only sense in which we can assign
a meaning to the word. Those most recently ren-
dered visible, for instance, by the great powers of
Lord Rosse's telescope, are at such an inconceivable
distance, that their light, travelling at the rate of
200,000 miles a second, cannot arrive at our little
planet in less time than fourteen thousand years !
Of this I am assured by one of our greatest living
74 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
astronomers. Fourteen thousand years of the his-
tory of the inhabitants of these systems, if in-
habitants there be, had passed away, during the
time that a ray of their light was travelling to
this tiny residence of curious little man ! Con-
sider, for a moment, that that ray of light must
have quitted its dazzling source eight thousand
years before the creation of Adam ! We have no
faculties to appreciate such ideas; yet are these
realities, or there are none, and our fancied know-
ledge is illusory.
Let us here pause for one moment in our breath-
less flight through the starry infinitude, and ask
our souls to reflect on the Almighty Maker of all !
Let us fall prostrate before Him, and ask with
trembling awe, What real idea have we of His
OMNIPRESENCE? He is present everywhere, for
everywhere he unceasingly acts ; but how this is,
we feel to be beyond our limited faculties. Such
knowledge is, indeed, too high for us we cannot
attain to it; but He has vouchsafed to tell us that
His throne is in heaven. Let us learn the impious
absurdity of attempting to judge of the Deity by
our own notions of great or small, or possible or
impossible. What were the thoughts and feel-
ings that led La Place to atheism, we do not
know ; but how different was the effect of these
visions of glory upon the mind of our own immortal
Newton ! How they expanded and elevated his
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 75
conception of Almighty power and wisdom ! Let
his own sublime words speak for themselves : " GOD
is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient ;
that is, HE endures from everlasting to everlasting,
and is present from infinity to infinity. He is not
eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite. He
IS not duration or space, but HE endures, and is
present. HE endures always, and is present every-
where ; and by existing always, and everywhere,
constitutes duration and space." *
Returning, for a moment, to the subject which
we have quitted, let us ask, with Sir John Her-
schel For what purposes are we to suppose such
magnificent bodies scattered through the abyss of
space? Again, we can now detect binary, physi-
cally binary, stars ; that is to say, a primary,
with a companion actually revolving round it.
" This," says Captain Smyth,f " is the wonderful
truth opened to view, that two suns, each self-
luminous, and probably with an attendant train of
planets, are gyrating round their common centre
of gravity under the same dynamical laics which
govern the solar system ; that is, not precisely like
our planets round one great luminary, but where
each constituent, with its accompanying orbs, re-
volves round an intermediate point or fixed centre !
* From the Scholium, annexed to the PRINCIPIA.
f P. 285. Printed for private circulation only, but presented by
the eminent author to the writer, for the purposes of this paper.
76 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
This is a great fact, and one which, in all proba-
bility, Newton himself never contemplated."
What, again, are we to say to the splendid
spectacle, and what can be the conceivable con-
dition of existence which it indicates, of richly
vari-coloured double stars of ruddy purple, yel-
low, white, orange, red, and blue! The larger
star is usually of a ruddy or orange hue the
smaller, blue or green ! " What illumination,"
says Sir John Herschel, " two suns a red and a
green, or a yellow and a blue one must afford a
planet, circulating about either ! And what charm-
ing .contrasts and grateful vicissitudes a red and
a green day, for instance, alternating with a white
one, and with darkness might arise from the
presence or absence of one or both above the
horizon ! " * What gorgeous scenes are these for
the imagination of man to revel in !
Again, we have at length accomplished the
feat, deemed by the greatest astronomers, till
within even the last few years, absolutely impos-
sible, of measuring the distance of a fixed star.
We have accomplished this in two instances :
The nearest,t one of the brightest stars in the
Southern Hemisphere, is at twenty-one millions of
millions of miles' distance ; that is, its light would
require three years and a quarter to reach us. The
second^ is not nearer to us than sixty-three billions
* HERSCHEL'S Astronomy, p. 395. f <*, Centauri. J 61, Cygni.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 77
of miles off, and its light requires upwards of ten
yeai-s to reach us. These inconceivable distances
have been measured to the utmost nicety, and, as
the Astronomer Royal recently explained to a
popular audience, really by means of a common
yard-measure ! But what proportion is there be-
tween even these enormous distances, and those of
the newly-discovered stars above spoken of, whose
light requires fourteen thousand years, travelling
at the rate of two hundred thousand miles a second,
to reach us ? It is absurd to suppose that either
figures, or, indeed, any other mode of communi-
cating ideas to the mind of man, can enable him
to appreciate such distances.
Again, man, little man, can positively ascertain
the weight of the Sun and his planets, including
even the remotest Neptune of which I have
more to say presently ; and, as a matter of detail,
can express that weight in pounds avoirdupois,
and down even to grains ! Think of man weigh-
ing the masses of these wondrous, enormous, and
immensely distant orbs !
Again, are we really aware of the rate at which
we, on our little planet, are at this moment travel-
ling in space, in our orbit round the sun ? I have,
within the last few days, put one of our best prac-
tical astronomers to the trouble, which he most
courteously undertook, of computing our rate of
transit through space in our journey round our cen-
78 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
tral luminary ; and here I give you his results.
While I was journeying yesterday from London
to Hull some 200 miles the planet, on which we
were creeping by steam-power, had travelled some
410,000 miles through space ! So that we are,
while I am speaking, whirling along, without being
in the least physically sensible of it, at the rate of
upwards of 68,000 miles an hour* more than a
thousand miles a minute and nineteen miles be-
tween two beats of a pendulum, or in a second of
time. I ask again Do you ever attempt to realise
such bewildering facts ?
Nor is this all I may surprise some present by
assuring them that the earth is believed, by all our
great astronomers, to have at this moment, not two
motions only, but three ! one round its axis,
which we can make evident to the very eye ;
another round the sun ; but what of the third?
A most remarkable, and equally mysterious fact:
that the sun and all his planets are moving with
prodigious velocity, through space, at the rate of
a hundred and fifty millions of miles a-year, to-
wards a particular point in the heavens, a star [X]
in the constellation Hercules ! " Every astro-
* While the earth moves 68,305 miles an hour, Mercury moves
more than 100,000 miles ; whence chemists use his symbol to denote
quick- silver. While we are disposed to regard this as a rapid mo-
tion round the sun, what must the inhabitants of Neptune, who
travels only three and a half miles a second, think of us, who are
whirling round the sun at six times the speed of Neptune ?
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 79
nomer who has examined the matter carefully,"
says the present Astronomer Royal, " has come to
the conclusion of Sir William Herschel, that the
whole solar system is moving bodily towards a
point in the constellation Hercules !"*
What means this ? and how can we sufficiently
estimate the critical and refined observations and
calculations by which the fact is established ? If
we be thus sweeping through the heavens, the con-
stellations must be altogether altered to the eyes
of our remote posterity. And dare one dream for
a moment of our little globe being ordained to
encounter obstruction in its pathway, and being
suddenly split into fragments by some huge orb,
or inflicting a similar fate on one as small as, or
smaller than, itself? Splendid stars have suddenly
appeared, and as suddenly disappeared from the
heavens, leaving us no means whatever of conjec-
turing the cause of these phenomena.!
Again, the sun,J which we feel, which we see,
* Lectures on Astronomy, 2d edit. 1849.
f On the evening of the llth November 1572, Tycho Brahe, the
great Danish astronomer, on returning from his laboratory to his
dwelling-house, was surprised to find a group of country folk staring
at a star, which he was certain had not existed half an hour before.
It was so bright as to cast a perceptible shadow. It surpassed
Jupiter at his brightest ! and was visible at mid-day. In March,
1574, it disappeared totally and for ever. Is there not here an in-
finite field for conjecture ? And this is by no means the only similar
instance of the kind.
I am informed by an astronomical friend, that the most recent
observations confirm the supposition that the sun is a black opaque
80 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
and observe ; which dazzles us every day ; which
rises and sets, as we say, magnificently every
morning and evening remains a profound mystery
with reference to its nature, and how its supply of
light and heat is maintained. " How so enormous
a conflagration," says Sir J. Herschel, " is kept up,
is a great mystery, which every discovery in either
chemistry or optics, so far from elucidating, seems
only to render more profound, and to remove far-
ther the prospect of probable explanation."*
Yet once more. We are making latterly, almost
monthly, discoveries in the heavens, of a most re-
markable character, with reference to certain small
bodies known by the name of Ultra-Zodiacal planets.
I have paid close attention to them, and received
constant information on the subject from that able
and vigilant astronomer, Mr Hind.| Listen, now,
to a true tale of wonder : Between the orbit of
Mars and Jupiter, there is, according to an
undoubted and remarkable law of progress of pla-
body, with a luminous and incandescent atmosphere, through which
the solar body is often seen in black spots, frequently of enormous
dimensions. A single spot seen with the naked eye, in the year
1843, was 77,000 miles in diameter. Sir John Herschel, in 1837,
witnessed a cluster of spots, including an area of 3,780,000 miles !
The connection between these spots, and the earth's magnetism,
has been already alluded to. Ante, p. 69, Note II.
* HEKSCHEL'S Disc, on Nat. Phil., p. 313. Astron. 212.
f This gentleman's recent publication, entitled The Solar System ;
a Descriptive Treatise upon the Sun, Moon, and Planets, including
all the Recent Discoveries, (Orr & Co., London,) 1852, is by far the
best extant, for its accurate and comprehensive treatment of the sub-
ject in its most recent aspect. The price is almost nominal.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 81
netary distance in our system, a space of three
hundred and fifty millions of miles ; and this im-
mense interval had no known tenants up to the
commencement of the present century. But so
great an unoccupied space was long ago found to be
an interruption of this order of planetary progres-
sion of the magnitudes of the planetary orbits :
a curious discovery of the Prussian astronomer
Bode. After long and deep revolving of the sub-
ject, he conjectured that a planet, now wanting,
must have existed in this vast interval of space ;
and that one might, in time, be discovered there.
Imagine, therefore, the astonishment with which,
during the first seven years of the present century,
four little planets Ceres, Juno, Pallas, and Vesta
were discovered, within this very interval^ revolv-
ing in most eccentric orbits ! " It has been con-
jectured," said Sir John Herschel, writing about
twenty years ago, " that these planets are frag-
ments of some greater planet, formerly circulating in
that interval, but which has been blown to atoms
by an explosion 5 and that more such fragments
exist, and may be hereafter discovered. These
may serve as a specimen of the dreams in which
astronomers, like other speculators, occasionally and
harmlessly indulge."* A dream ? Will it be be-
lieved, that within this last seven years, no fewer
than TWENTY more of these mysterious tenants of
* Astron. p. 277.
F
62 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
that identical interval of space have been dis-
covered ! NINE of them within this very year,
1852 the last of them by Mr Hind, on the 18th
of this present month of December ! Are not
these, as it were, the elements of an astronomical
romance? The orbits and motions of these little
planets are all of the same character, and may be
truly said to exhibit excessively complicated vaga-
ries, such as are very likely to bring them into
collision with each other ! And in the opinion of
astronomers, the most reasonable explanation of
these astonishing phenomena is, that this zone of
planets really consists of the fragments of some
great one shattered by an internal convulsion !
To what reflections does not such a possibility
(and no one is entitled, as I believe few are now
disposed, to call it chimerical) give rise ! If the
supposition be true that these bodies are planetary
fragments, was the globe of which they once
formed part destroyed by an internal explosion,
or by external collision, or in any other way,
under the fiat of the Deity? Was it inhabited
at the time, and by beings like ourselves? And
was it their destruction ? And as we cannot
entertain the impious supposition that this pos-
sible result was occasioned by accident or negli-
gence, dare we indulge in speculation as to the
hidden economy of the heavens, administered by
the Omniscient?
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 83
But let us now descend for a moment to our own
tiny planet, to ask one or two questions concerning
it. Its polar and equatorial diameters differ by only
twenty-six and a half miles ; and the greater of the
two the equatorial is 7925 miles. When we
talk of " descending into the bowels of the earth,"
therefore, we had better use less ambitious phraseo-
logy, and consider our excavations as being, in
Sir John Herschel's language, mere scratches of the
exterior only; for our deepest mines have never
penetrated lower than to the ten-thousandth part
of the distance between the earth's surface and its
centre.* As far as scientific researches enable
us to conjecture, we should conclude that when our
earth was first set in motion,t it must have been
* HERSCHEL'S Discourse, 288.
f In one of Sir Isaac Newton's Four Letters to Dr Bentley, and
which are worth their weight in gold to every inquiring mind,
occurs the following memorable passage. To the second question
of Dr Bentley, Sir Isaac replied, that the present planetary mo-
tions could not have sprung from any natural cause alone, but
were impressed by an intelligent agent. " To make such a sys-
tem, with all its motions, required a Cause which understood and
compared together the quantities of matter in the several bodies of
the Sun and planets, and the gravitating powers resulting thence ;
the several distances of the primary planets from the Sun, and of
the secondary ones from Saturn, Jupiter, and the Earth, and the
velocities with which these planets could revolve about those quan-
tities of matter in the central bodies ; and to compare and adjust
all these things together, in so great a variety of bodies, argues
that Cause to be not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in
mechanics and geometry." In his Optici (Query 28) this great man
asks "How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so
much art, and for what ends were their several parts ? Was the
eye contrived without skill in optics, and the ear without know-
84 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
somewhat soft, in order to have produced its pre-
sent undoubted spheroidal form.* But what is the
real nature of the earth's interior ? Transcendental
mathematics fully recognise the principle of inter-
nal fluidity or fusion ; while all our actual observa-
tions point to the existence of heat in a greater
degree the lower we go. M. Humboldt, indeed,
tells us that, at only thirty-five miles' distance from
the earth's surface, " the central heat is everywhere
so great, that, granite itself is held in fusion / "f
Our internal fires seem to find a vent by means of
earthquakes and volcanoes.
Is this planet of ours destined, then, to share the
conjectured fate of that whose fragments are still
circulating in space around us, and being in such
rapid succession discovered by our vigilant watchers
of the heavens ?
Once more, however, let us ascend into the
resplendent regions which we have so suddenly
quitted, in order to alight upon, and scrutinise a
mere speck among them to advert to an astrono-
mical discovery that will for ever signalise our age,
us the result of a vast stretch of human intellect,
one that would have gladdened the heart of NEAV-
ledge of sounds ?" Doubtless his mind had present to it the sub-
lime question of the Psalmist : He that planted the ear, shall he not
heart He that formed the eye, shall he not see ? Psalm xciv. 9.
* And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was
upon the face of the deep ; and the Spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters. Gen. i. 2.
f Kosmos, vol. i. p. 273.
OP THE PRESEXT AGE. 85
TON himself. I allude to the discoveiy, six years
ago, of the planet Neptune.
In the year 1781, Sir William Herschel at once
almost doubled the boundaries of the solar system,
by his brilliant discovery of the planet Uranus,* at
the distance of eighteen hundred and twenty-two
millions of miles from the sun, and travelling in
his orbit in thirty thousand six hundred and
eighty-six days, or fifteen thousand five hundred
miles an hour. This dignified visitant has a dia-
meter of thirty-six thousand miles, and is attended
by six satellites during his eighty-four years' tour
round his and our central luminary. Thus much
for Uranus.
Many years afterwards, certain differences were
observed by French and English astronomers be-
tween this planet's true places, and those indicated
by theoretic calculation ; and at length it was sug-
gested that the cause might be attributed to the
perturbing influence of some unseen planet. They
thought, however, that if this were really the
solution of these differences between calculation
* Uranus was the father of Saturn ; and the Prussian astronomer,
Bode, suggested, that as the new planet was next to Saturn, it
should be called by the name of Uranus. M. La Place, however,
generously insisted on its bearing the name of its English discoverer.
It passed, however, by the name of the Georgium Sidus, in com-
pliment to Geo. III., the munificent patron of astronomical science,
until the year 1851, when, in the Nautical Almanac of that year, it
was called by the name of Uranus a change made with the disin-
terested concurrence of the present Sir J. Hersshel, the modest
con of the great discoverer. See Mr HIND'S Solar System, p. 119.
86 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
and observation, it would be almost an impos-
sibility to establish the fact, and ascertain the un-
seen planet's place in the heavens. This was the
deliberate opinion of M. Eugene Bouvard, one of
the greatest French geometers of the day. Never-
theless, Mr Adams, an English, and M. Le Verrier,
a French astronomer, unknown to, and entirely
independently of each other, commenced a series
of elaborate and profound mathematical calcula-
tions, proceeding on different methods, to solve the
great problem, which was thus stated by M. Le
Verrier : " ]s it possible that the inequalities of
Uranus are due to the action of a planet situated
in the ecliptic, at a mean distance double that of
Uranus ? If so, where is the planet actually situ-
ated, what is its mass, and what are the elements of
its orbit?" Our distinguished countryman, Mr
Adams, a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge,
and whom I saw receive the gold medal of the
Royal Society, as some token entertained of his
transcendent merits as a mathematician, had di-
rected his attention to this matter in the year 1843
his object being to " ascertain the probable effect
of a more distant planet ;" and he succeeded in
obtaining an approximate solution of the inverse
problem of perturbations ; that is to say, given
certain observed disturbances ; to find the posi-
tions and paths of the body producing them. In
other words, the great planet Uranus was occasion-
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 87
ally disturbed in his course by the attraction of an
unlcnown body ; and the object was to determine
the fact without waiting for the visible existence
of that body.
It would be vain to attempt to make the nature
of these grand calculations* popularly intelligible ;
nor am I mathematician enough to presume to
make the attempt. These twin sons of science
were supremely successful. On the 23d September
1846, the splendid stranger became visible, in dia-
meter about forty-two thousand milesf that is,
upwards of five times that of our earth, and
attended by at least one visible satellite. Neptune
performs his stately journey round the sun, from
which he is distant two thousand eight hundred
and fifty millions of miles, in one hundred and
sixty-six years, or sixty thousand six hundred and
twenty-four days !
Thus not only did these two astronomers point
out where this huge distant orb would be found
in such immensely distant space, but weighed its
mass, numbered the years of its revolution, and
told the dimensions of its orbit !
Would that France and England might never
* Till within the last thirty years, it was considered that our
English mathematicians were inferior to their Continental brethren
in the higher departments of mathematics ; but I believe it is
generally admitted that the former are now equal to any in tho
world.
f Mr Hind says about thirty-one thousand.
88 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
again be seen in any but such glorious rivalry as
they thus exhibited, in the persons of these their
highly-gifted sons ; who, by the way. must be
acknowledged by the unknown philosopher of
whom I spoke some time ago, to have been cer-
tainly a very superb pair of electrical calculating
machines !
What, however, is the above, or what are any
other discoveries, when placed by the side of that
of Gravitation by the immortal Newton ? This, it
were hardly extravagant to regard as an exercise
of celestial genius, by which it seemed to have
gained the true key to the motions of the whole
universe. The whole material universe, says Sir
David Brewster, was spread before the discoverer
of this law : the Sun with all his attendant planets
the planets with all their satellites ; the comets
whirling about in every direction in their eccentric
orbits ; and the system of the Fixed Stars, stretch-
ing to the remotest limits of space !*
The minds of even ordinary men expand, but at
the same time droop, while contemplating such
amazing and unapproachable intellectual power as
this. Dr Thomas Brown, one of the most distin-
guished modern Scottish teachers of mental and
* Life of Newton, p. 153. When Newton began to find his calcu-
lations verifying the sublime discovery of the law of gravitation, he
became too agitated to pursue them, and intrusted the completion
of the details to a friend. When before has any other human breast
vibrated with anxieties such as these ?
OF THE PRESENT AGE.
moral philosophy, thus speaks of Newton : " The
powers and attainments of this almost superhuman
genius, at once make us proud of our common
nature, and humble us with a sense of our disparity.
If," he continues, " the minds of all men, from the
creation of the world, had been similar to the mind of
Newton, is it possible to conceive that the state of
any science would have been at this moment what it
now is, or in any respect similar, though the laws
which regulate the physical changes in the material
universe had continued unaltered, and no change
occurred, but in the simple original susceptibilities
of the mind itself?" What a question for a specu-
lative mind !
But it is time to ask, why are we thus wander-
ing amid the splendid solitudes of heaven ? Why,
to echo a question already hinted at, has man been
permitted, thus late too in his history, to make
himself so far, if one may so speak, familiar with
infinitude? He sinks from these dazzling regions
bewildered and overwhelmed; as though the
Finite had been paralysed by momentary contact
with the Infinite ; and is relieved to find himself
once again upon his little native earth his ap-
pointed home, and scene of pilgrimage and proba-
tion. Here again, however, he finds everything
unexhausted, inexhaustible, accumulating upon, and
overwhelming him, whichever way he turns. Yet
a new light gleams upon him, while he directs his
90 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
wandering eyes towards the inner portions of the
crust of that earth which he had trod for so many-
ages, without dreaming of what was lying beneath,
and destined one day to be exposed to his wonder-
ing eyes. What would have been the effect on
Aristotle's mind, of our geological discoveries ?
Man now perceives indubitable traces of past
scenes of existence, of which all his recorded
history has said nothing ; traces apparently re-
served, in the Providence of God, to be examined
and pondered in only these our own times, after
so many ages of concealment. Far beneath the
surface of the earth, we discover the fossilised re-
mains of its ancient tenants, who seem to have
occupied the globe at different periods probably,
too, at vast intervals, and under widely different,
but perfectly appropriate, circumstances and condi-
tions. They appear to have been placed upon it
at a given period, for a specified purpose, in a de-
termined order ; and having unconsciously accom-
plished that purpose, they mysteriously disappear,
but in a wonderful order, and leave behind them
the still visible and incontestable proofs of their
past existence. O, how eloquent, how deeply
suggestive are these mute vouchers of past eco-
nomies ! instituted and sustained by one and the
same Almighty Being, who, by the word of His
power," upholds present existence ! Many of
these remains appear to us huge and monstrous ;
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 91
and huge and fearful they undoubtedly seein to
have been, beyond any creatures inhabiting the
earth within our time. Our time f What do I
mean? Who are WE? MAN : concerning whom
all geology is, with an awful significance, abso-
lutely silent, through all its centuries and ages,
how continuous and remote soever they may be,
since it owns that it has to deal only with times an-
terior to the appearance of Man upon the appointed
scene of his lordship a scene which geology shows
to have been carefully prepared for him. No, not
the faintest trace of his presence, his footsteps, or
his handiwork, can be detected in any of the pages
of this stony volume, wherever it has hitherto been
opened, though examined never so minutely;
he is as absolute a stranger as though he were not
at this moment, and never had been, a denizen of
the planet ! This negative eloquence of geology
has always appeared to me profoundly suggestive.
None of its researches in any part of the globe have
hitherto succeeded in bringing to light one single
fragment of the fossilised frame of man, in any un-
disturbed geological formation, by which is meant
those portions of the earth's crust to which, though
the most recent formations in geology, geologists
assign a much higher antiquity than any reached
by history. It is true that some petrified human
skeletons have been found, as, for instance, in that
part of the shores of the island of Guadaloupe where
92 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
the percolation of calcareous springs speedily petri-
fies everything subjected to their influence. There
is a solitary specimen of a petrified skeleton, found
at that island under such circumstances, now to be
seen in the British Museum ; and which a cele-
brated anatomical friend of mine regards, on ac-
count of certain peculiarities in the pelvis, as having
been the skeleton of a negro. If this be so, its date
must be, of course, subsequent to the discovery of
Guadaloupe by Europeans.* It is not, in other
words, the skeleton of one of the Caribs, the origi-
nal inhabitants ; and cannot be more than between
two and three hundred years old. One or two
other human skeletons have been found, which may
be similarly accounted for.
Thus, then, the new and brilliant science of geo-
logy attests that man was the last of created beings
in this planet. If her data be consistent and true,
and worthy of scientific consideration, she affords
conclusive evidence that, as we are told in Scrip-
ture, he cannot have occupied the earth longer than
six thousand years.^
Sir Isaac Newton's sagacious intellect had arrived
at a similar conclusion from different premises, and
long before the geologist had made his researches
and discoveries. " He appeared," said one who
conversed with him not long before his death, and
has carefully recorded what he justly styles "a re-
* A.D. 1493. f HITCHCOCK, Religion of Geology, p. I;>7.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 93
markable and curious conversation," " to be very
clearly of opinion, that the inhabitants of this world
were of a short date 5 and alleged as one reason
for that opinion, that all arts as letters, ships,
printing, the needle, &c. were discovered within
the memory of history, which could not have
happened if the world had been eternal; and
that there were visible marks of ruin upon it,
which could not have been effected by a flood
only."*
Man cannot shut his eyes upon the actual reve-
lations of geology, any more than he can upon the
written revelations contained in the Scriptures. It
were foolish, nay dangerous, and even impious, to
do so. We may depend upon it that God designed
us, and permitted us, for wise purposes, to make
these astonishing discoveries, or He would have
kept them for ever hidden from our sight; and,
forsooth, shall we then turn round upon our Omni-
scient Maker, and venture to tell Him that He is
contradicting His written word ? What a spectacle
for men and angels ! The Creature and its Crea-
tor, the Finite and the Infinite, at issue ! For
indeed it would, and must needs be so. Infinite
Goodness and Wisdom have presented to us the
Scriptures as being the eternal truth of God, who
has so accredited it to the faculties which He him-
self has given us for discovering truth, that we
* BHEWSTEH'S Life of Newton, p. 365.
94 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
have reverently received it as such ; countless mil-
lions of His creatures have lived and died in that
belief, and among them the mightiest intellects
the best and greatest of our species ; and yet it is
to be imagined that they have all had only a strong
delusion sent them that they should believe a lie, and
in that lie should live and die ! Nay, but let us
not thus judge the Deity, who does not deceive his
creatures. Yea, let God be true, but every man a
liar.
If, then, the written word of God be true, His
works cannot contradict it, however our folly and
presumption may make it for a time so appear ;
and, on the opposite assumption, we are to sup-
pose that the Author of Nature has expressly
revealed to us, in this latter day, some of the for-
mer conditions of the earth, only in order to con-
tradict His own written Word previously given to us
for our guidance in this transitory scene of being !
And is this, then, to be the sum and substance of
the good which geology has done mankind? It
is not so it cannot be so ; nothing but weakness
or wickedness can thus wrest geology from its
true tendency and purpose, and convert it from a
witness to the truth, into a proof of falsehood.
One who may perhaps be regarded as exhibiting
the highest condition of the intellect of this age,
and thoroughly imbued with the spirit of philo-
sophy of which he is its leading exponent and
OP THE PRESENT AGE. 95
representative has placed on record his deliberate
conviction that " the study of natural philosophy,
so far from leading man to doubt the immortality
of the soul, and to scoff at revealed religion, has,
on every well-constituted mind, a natural effect
directly the contrary. The testimony of natural
reason," continues Sir John Herschel for it is he
of whom I speak " on whatever exercised, must
of necessity stop short of those truths which it is
the object of revelation to make known ; but while
it places the existence and principal attributes of a
Deity on such grounds as to render doubt absurd,
and atheism ridiculous, it unquestionably opposes
no natural or necessary obstacle to further progress.
. . . . The character of the true philosopher
is to hope all things not impossible, and to believe
all things not unreasonable." He proceeds, in an
admirable spirit, to say, that we must take care
that the testimony afforded by science to religion,
be its extent or value what it may, shall be at
least independent, unbiassed, and spontaneous ;
and he reprobates not only such vain attempts as
would make all nature bend to narrow interpreta-
tions of obscure and difficult passages in the sacred
writings, but the morbid sensibility of those who
exult and applaud when any facts start up expla-
natory, as they suppose, of some Scriptural allu-
sions, and feel pained and disappointed when the
general course of discovery in any department of
96 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
science runs wide of the notions with which parti-
cular passages in the Bible may have impressed
such persons themselves. By such it should be
remembered that, on the one hand, truth can never
be opposed to truth and, on the other, that error
is to be effectually confounded only by searching
deep and tracing it to its source.*
Thus far Philosophy, in a true and noble spirit ;
and it is specially applicable to the subject of Geo-
logy-
Geology is to be regarded as a science in gigan-
tic infancy, promising a truly marvellous manhood.
It is one so essentially adapted to excite the imagi-
nation, that professors of the science are required
to exercise a severe restraint upon that faculty ; and,
discarding all tendency to theorising, approach the
sufficiently astounding facts with which they have
to deal, in a cold and rigorous spirit of philosophical
investigation. It is hard to many to approach it
without disturbing prepossessions ; and those who
cannot get rid of them may, if diligent observers,
accumulate facts, but must be content to leave
greater intellects to deal with them. This import-
ant science has had to contend with great disad-
vantages some of them peculiar ; but it is over-
coming them, and will continue to do so. I shall
not indicate what I conceive these peculiar disad-
vantages to be, because they will occur to any one
* HEBSCHEL, Disc, on Nat. Phil. pp. 7-10.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 97
who has even only moderately directed his atten-
tion to this splendid subject. As long as the facts
of geology are carefully ascertained, and dealt
with simply as facts, as those of all other sciences,
and it be not attempted to put them together
prematurely, and announce confidently the parti-
cular tendency which they may really only seem
to indicate, while their true bearing is in quite an
opposite direction so long, but so long only, geo-
logists may depend upon it that they are contribut-
ing to the formation of a science destined, perhaps,
to eclipse all others except astronomy, and even rival
it. Geology depends on the continual accumulation
of observations carried on for ages> If the geologists
of the present day should forget this fact, and breath-
lessly begin to construct theories and systems on the
strength of a few coincident facts, they may here-
after be regarded as mere children, and not as
philosophers conscious of the grandeur of the in-
quiries in which they are privileged to take part.
The great hope, however, of geology is, the sobriety
and system with which great numbers of qualified
observers are simultaneously prosecuting their in-
quiries and experiments in so many quarters of the
earth at once. Its structure affords already conclu-
sive evidence not only of formations singularly in
unison with each other, though at immense distances,
but also of the operation of vast forces, in past ages,
of only a conjectural character and mode of opera-
98 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
tion. Let any one go through the Alps, as I did
lately, and the most hasty glance at the confused
position of the strata will satisfy him that geology
has to deal with facts dislocating all suggested
hypotheses.
It is, however, the organic remains, animal and
vegetable, which are found in these various strata,
where they have lain hidden for a long series of
ages, that present geology in its most attractive
aspect, and give the reins to the imagination.
What are we to say, for instance, to the visible
remnants of a monster, partaking of the nature of a
fish and a crocodile, the eyes of which are of such
magnitude that each requires a string five feet long
to surround it the diameter of the orbit being
eighteen inches ? How hideous must such an
object have appeared ! * There are few of our
leading museums that are not enriched with fossil
remains of these strange stupendous animals, point-
ing indubitably to a long succession of ages, when
creatures of this kind, with their appropriate ani-
mal and vegetable aliment, seem to have had this
earth of ours entirely to themselves. This is a state
of facts for which our minds were quite unprepared,
and with which we may not even yet be compe-
tent to deal soberly. I shall, however, quit this
deeply interesting subject, with the remark, that
* These dimensions exist in the fossil remains of an Icthyosaurus
to be seen in the Geological Museum, in King's College, London.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 99
as astronomy expands our conceptions of splen-
dour and space, so geology enlarges our ideas
of duration and time ; while both these magni-
ficent sciences, the farther they are prosecuted,
supply the more conclusive and awe-inspiring evi-.
dence of the unity of the Creator. And finally, we
may safely concur in the observation of an eloquent
American writer on these subjects,* that the
merest child in a Christian land, in the nineteenth
century, has a far wider and nobler conception of
the perfections of Jehovah, than the wisest philo-
sopher who lived before astronomy had gone forth
on her circumnavigation of the universe. He might
have added, and before geology had disclosed His
mysterious handiwork in our own inner earth.
Let me, however, now point out a recent
fact, which appears to me to have a marvellous
significance, and perhaps a designed coincidence.
While men were, and continue to be, busily
exploring the earth in search of traces of long
past existence, endeavouring to establish its vast
antiquity, and the changes which it has undergone,
we may suddenly behold, reverently be it said !
the dread finger of the Deity silently pointing to
that same earth, as containing unerring evidence
of the truth of His WRITTEN WORD. Let us wend
our wondering way to Nineveh, and gaze at its
extraordinary excavations. There are indeed seen
* Dr HITCHCOCK, Religion of Geology, p. 416.
100 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
those traces of man which geology has never
found ; man as he existed near four thousand
years ago ; man as he acted and suffered ; man as
he became the subject of God's judgments ; man,
whose fate had been foretold by the messengers of
God ! Here behold an ancient and mighty capital,
and its cruel and idolatrous people, as it were
reproduced before our eyes, and disinterred from
the dust and gloom of ages !
O ye men of Nineveh ! are you indeed already
rising up before us, to condemn us ? *
To my mind these contemplations are pregnant
with instruction, and invested with awe. I cannot
go to our national museum, and behold there the
recently-disinterred monuments of past Assyrian
existence, without regarding them by the light of
the Scriptures ; nor afterwards read the Scriptures,
without additional light reflected upon them from
these wondrous discoveries. May I, for instance,
be really looking upon the idol Nisroch,f of whom
I read in Holy Writ, and of the royal parricides
of whom it speaks ? So Sennacherib King of As-
syria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at
* The men of Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this
generation, and shall condemn it : for they repented at the preach-
i' n ff f Jonas ; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.
Luke xi. 32.
"t* See Mr Layard's admirable and deeply interesting Nineveh
and its Remains, of which a cheap abridgment, with numerous
woodcuts, was published by himself in 1851, entitled, A Popular
Account of Discoveries at Nineveh, p. 47.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 101
Nineveh. And it came to pass, as he was wor-
shipping in the house of Nisroch his god-, that
Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with
the sword / *
Surely, surely, we live in an age of wonderful
discoveries and coincidences; and it must be our
fault if we do not profit by them, as it is our duty
to make the attempt.
It seems to me that no rightly-constituted mind
can ponder these subjects without being deeply and
beneficially affected. It is in vain, however, to
reason with one whose mind is insolently made up
to treat them with contempt, and to disregard
accumulating evidence a hundredfold stronger than
induces it to act confidently in the most important
concerns of life. A disposition of this kind may in
time be visited by a judicial blindness. Let those,
on the contrary, of a nobler character, but who
have been agitated by doubts from which perhaps
few are free, reflect on the benignant dispensation
which enables us, by new discoveries in science, to
comprehend much that was previously dark in
God's revelation through the Scriptures. The
book of nature having been thus opened to us for
so grand a purpose, may we not humbly hope that
that book will not be closed again, before every-
thing that forms still a stumbling-block to belief
be removed? There may have been scoffers in
* 2 Kings, six. 36, 37.
102 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
former days, whom the discovery to which I am
alluding would have startled, and silenced. Had
Lord Shaftesbury, and those who thought with
him, lived in this our time, let us express a hope
that they would be now proclaiming what they
once denied ; and we cannot be sufficiently thankful
to the Supreme Disposer of Events, that it has
pleased Him to reserve ourselves, on whom it may
be that the ends of the world are come, for a
season of greater light !
Let, then, the geologist go on with his re-
searches, and double his discoveries; nay, inde-
finitely increase their number and significancy.
Let him, if he please, and think himself entitled to
do so and it has been sarcastically said that time
is a cheap commodity with geologists talk of his
millions and millions upon millions of ages, if he
think his eye really capable of piercing so far
back into eternity. If he be right, he shall never
satisfy me that my God is wrong ; for / know in
whom I have believed:
He is his own interpreter,
And He will make it plain !
And now the current of our inquiries is bring-
ing us in view of objects and ends demanding our
most serious attention.
We have been hitherto inquiring into the INTEL-
LECTUAL development of the age in which we live;
and for that purpose have had to pass in rapid
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 103
review the state of knowledge, and of consequent
power, to which the exertions of the human intel-
lect have brought us. We have endeavoured to
show that we have no sufficient reason for believ-
ing that the intellect of man has either increased
or diminished in absolute strength or capacity, as
far as we have any means of judging of its action,
when fitting occasions arose to develop its en-
ergies ; that all our researches into the nature of
intellectual existence and action have failed of
bringing us satisfactory results ; that we know
that we live, though not how we live ; we think,
but know not how we think ; and that it may per-
haps have been so ordained by Infinite Wisdom,
that impassable bounds should be placed to the
anxious and insatiable curiosity of man. I am
speaking, I repeat again, solely at present of
human means and sources of knowledge. One
observation, faintly alluded to at the commence-
ment of this paper, surely must, by this time,
have forced itself upon us : that while the retro-
spect of six thousand years from which I exclude
our first parent, whose intellect originally, and
before he had darkened the glorious image and
likeness in which he was made, may have been
endowed with powers transcending all conception
by his degenerate though still gifted successors
shows mental philosophy to have been, compara-
tively speaking, stationary, physical discovery has
104 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
made, and that latterly, advances so prodigious.
Let us attempt in imagination to realise the space
gone over, by supposing that greatest among the
ancient philosophers, Aristotle, placed in possession
of our microscope ; our telescope, and other astro-
nomical instruments ; our chemical and mechanical
instruments, and of their amazing results ; and the
present state of anatomical, physiological, and geo-
logical knowledge. How would he now look at
the earth ! and at the heavens ! at the elements !
and at MAN ? And when the astounded philoso-
pher began at length to look for corresponding
advances in metaphysical or psychological know-
ledge, what should we say ? What would he
think?
Again, let us suppose ourselves to wake up
to-morrow morning in his day ! without steam,
without magnetism, without electricity, and all
the amazing results which they have effected !
without the telescope ! without the microscope,
and all their mighty revelations ! Nay, even to
descend for a moment to particulars, without our
gas, without our newspapers, without, in other
words, our present physical and intellectual light !
without the steamboat, the railroad, the electric
telegraph ! What a sudden and dreary eclipse !
How confounding and intolerable to those recol-
lecting so different a state of social existence !
How we should creep and grope our way about, as
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 105
in a state of childhood ! And shall we continue
our course backwards, as far beyond Aristotle's
day as his beyond ours ? Let us suddenly return
to our present day, passing in our flight those
two great lights, at intervals of centuries, the two
Bacons, Roger and Francis, and Newton ; and let
us venture to anticipate the dim future, our phy-
sical knowledge and position twenty-two centuries
hence, if our species shall then, in God's good
pleasure, continue upon the earth, the fat not
having then gone forth, that Time shall be no
longer !
Where may then be the seats of mankind V
their language ? their modes of communica-
tion ? of government ? their knowledge and
use of nature, and its powers ? of the Heavens,
and the Earth's relations to them ? Will the land
and the water have again changed places ? May
we imagine our posterity, some two or three
thousand years hence, exhuming the fossilised
remains of their ancestry in every quarter of the
globe accessible to the search ? Will they be
speculating upon our size so much greater, or
less than, or the same as their own ? upon our
tastes, and habits, and doings ? Will our history
have perished ? or, if it survive, will it tell of us
truly, or falsely V Will the period of our existence
be assigned to a date a million of ages anterior to
its actual one ? Will our ignorance of the laws of
106 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
nature, as then understood, of the constitution of
the human mind, be spoken of with pity and
wonder ?
Thus, indeed, may we dream and speculate, if
we please, as to the possible future, and its condi-
tions with reference to the present and the past. It
is with the present that man is practically concerned;
but of that present, though it may seem paradoxical
to say it, both the past and the future are inevitable
and essential elements and conditions. Our Now
reflects the lights and shadows of what has gone
before and is following, and has necessary relations
to man's special and limited intellectual faculties.
How different is the Now of man, and the NOW of
his Maker ! The difference involves the distinction
between Time and Eternity, between the Creator
and the creature, the Finite and the Infinite ; and
may, if pondered, afford a few trembling gleams
of light upon some of the possible conditions of
Omniscience. " The whole evolutions of time and
ages," said More, " from everlasting to everlast-
ing, is collectedly and presentifickly represented
to God at once ; as if all things and actions were,
at this very instant, really present and distinct
before him."* How can mortal man address his
faculties to such a subject ? They are as unfit to
deal with it, as the eye to hear, or the ear to see ;
and it is something even to persuade ourselves of
* Defence of the Philosophic Callala, c. 2.
OK THE PRESENT AGE. 107
that fact and certainty. It may serve to save the
soul of man from endless trouble and perplexity,
and to reduce it to that condition which alone it is
fitted to enjoy. But we do not sufficiently exercise
ourselves in this matter. We soothe ourselves with
sounds ; talking as freely and unconcernedly about
omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, as
though they really represented to our understand-
ings the comprehensible attributes of the incom-
prehensible Deity ; as if " by searching " we had
" found out the Almighty unto perfection ! " I am
speaking here of the mere unassisted exercise of
human reason, which appears to me incompetent to
deal fully with our " Now ;" and the more that we
endeavour to realise this fact, the better shall we
find it, for both speculation and practice, in the state
of things in which we are conscious that we have
been placed by our Maker, and to which our faculties
have been adjusted : and in which we are ordained
to see through a glass darkly, and to know in part.
So it is ; and the restless, and too often insolent,
spirit of man must accommodate itself to that fact ;
and if he do not, he will assuredly make mental and
moral shipwreck. The best thinkers of the present
age are those who rigorously act upon this prin-
ciple, and are most on their guard against urging
speculation into regions virtually forbidden to the
prying of hum'an faculties ; because they are, as I
have said, absolutely unfitted for them ; as is griev-
108 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
ously evidenced by the inconsistent and contradic-
tory character of such speculations as we have
several times alluded to, the absurdities to which
they lead legitimately, and their practical useless-
ness, and danger.
These observations may serve to connect our
present topics with those touched upon before we
started on our multifarious inquiries.
They remind us that our inquiry is not limited
to the intellectual, but extends to the MORAL de-
velopment of our species in the present age ; and
that again remits us to an early observation, that
there are profound relations between intellect and
morality, involving everything that concerns the
highest interests of humanity.* The truth is,
that intellect stands to morality in the relation
of means to an end ; that the culture and exer-
cise of the intellect are not, and cannot be, of
themselves, final objects or ends, but necessarily
presuppose and lead to ends. This is a doctrine
as old as the great Stagyrite ; who, to adopt the
eloquent language of the present occupant of the
pulpit of Hookeiyf "laid the foundation of his ethical
system in a recognition of the great truth, that the
end of man is not knowledge^ but practice. \
* Ante, p. 8.
f* Archdeacon Robinson, the Master of the Temple.
To Is -riKtf eu yvZirt;, JUa {{. (Eth. i. 3.) The trvuufi'n and
Xtr,<riu*y of Aristotle express both of them non-finality; and all
"goods" coming under either designation, are only subordinate
OP THE PRESENT AGE. 109
" A wiser than the Stagyrite has told us that the
whole of man his duty, his happiness, his immor-
tality, is comprised in this to fear God, and to
keep his commandments.*
" But an infinitely greater than Solomon has also
authoritatively told us, that the entire subjection of
the soul to the obedience of FAITH, is not only
itself demanded of us, but is also at the same time
constituted the only avenue to further knowledge.
If any man WiLLf do His will, he shall know of
the doctrine whether it be of God."
Thus, as it were, with one stride, we have reached
the goal the final end of man of his existence
and doings ; to which they all inevitably tend, and
the attaining of which contributes the true and
only business of life ! His intellect is given him
to aid in discerning that end, and to enable him
to regulate his conduct in this life, so as to
attain that which is beyond it the glorious frui-
tion of a happy Hereafter. But where are we
standing? On the shore of a vast deep sea
of ethical or moral philosophy ; by which I
mean simply, that system or theory of prin-
ciples regulating man as a moral and respon-
goods, implying the existence of something higher and better.
With Aristotle, that something was happiness ; with us, it should
be the happiness the only true and ultimate one secured by
salvation.
* Eccles. xii. 13.
t The Greek has a signal significance of expression 1* rit 6EAH
itvrtv VwciV.
110 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
sible agent, especially in respect of its motives
and sanctions.
This great subject I have approached suddenly,
and, right or wrong, in the decisive spirit of one
whose mind, after revolving it all his life as a
matter of personal concernment, is thoroughly
made up upon it. With such a subject, and with
such a feeling, it were idle, and even criminal, for
a moment, especially on such an occasion as this, to
dally or to palter ; and I shall speak humbly, and
without reserve, my sincere convictions. In an early
part of this paper, it is said that everything depends,
in these inquiries, on taking a right point of view 5
for that there is one, from which all presents to the
contemplative mind a lovely but awful order ; and
another, from which everything appears inextricable
and hopeless confusion and contradiction, involving
man himself, and all within and without him.
Nearly two centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton con-
cluded his Optical Queries, by a memorable predic-
tion, as it was justly termed by Dugald Stewart,
" that if Natural Philosophy, in all its parts, by pur-
suing the inductive method, shall at length be per-
fected, the bounds of Moral Philosophy will be enlarged
also." We have not, during the splendid times which
have succeeded his own, perfected natural philo-
sophy, but have rigorously pursued the inductive
method, and thereby immensely enlarged the bounds
of natural philosophy. Have we also enlarged those
OF THE PRESENT AGE. Ill
of moral philosophy ? In one respect we have
by incessantly accumulating proofs, each new one
on a sublimer scale, of our Almighty Maker's wis-
dom, power, beneficence, and unity of action, and
of His title to the love, adoration, and obedience
of His creatures. A living successor of Sir Isaac
Newton, Sir John Herschel, tells us that the steady
application of the inductive system to physics, ne-
cessarily tends to impress something of the well-
weighed and progressive character of science on
the more complicated conduct of our social and
moral relations ; that it is thus that legislation and
politics come gradually to be regarded as experi-
mental sciences, founded in the moral and physical
nature of man, and to be constantly accumulating
towards the solution of the grand problem how the
advantages of government are to be secured with
the least possible inconvenience to the governed.*
Perhaps it may be truly said, in passing, that while
the steadfast progress of experimental philosophy
is one of the grandest features of the age, it is not
unaccompanied with danger, in so far as the spirit
which it generates may be disposed to address
itself, flushed with triumph, to matters which are
not the subject of experimental treatment.
I have my own opinions concerning the science
of political economy, which I need not obtrude upon
you ; but that legislation and politics depend on
* Discourse, p. 73.
112 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
fixed principles, however difficult formally to define
and agree upon them ; and that those principles
have relation to the moral and physical nature of
man, can no more be douhted, than one can deny
the existence, as a distinguishing characteristic of
the present age, of a sincere desire to discern and
act upon those principles. Into those questions, so
unhappily intermingled with violent passions and
personal interests, I shall not enter for one mo-
ment, because I am satisfied with another and a
vast one it is what is the moral nature of man ?
for the determining that, and the rules of conduct
conformable to it, constitute what is called Moral
Philosophy. Before proceeding further, let me
say, that if you wish really to ascertain the facts
on which to reason with reference to man's moral
nature, do not go to the speculative moralist, sitting
in his library, spinning scheme after scheme of so-
called morality, often only fantastic variations of
those of long-forgotten predecessors ; but go to the
lawyer, the physician, the divine, who see human
nature from day to day in its practical aspects,
those which are hidden from the eyes of mere
talkers and writers, however eloquent and inge-
nious. The former can tell you of the actual phy-
sical and moral condition of our species, in every
class of life from the lowest to the highest even
in the highest conditions of modern civilisation.
Ask, again, those noble messengers of mercy, who,
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 113
with only the eye of their heavenly Father upon
them, shedding around them a radiance unseen of
man, go about doing good visiting those hidden
scenes of suffering'
Where hopeless anguish pours her moan>
And lonely want retires to die !
Ask them, I say, ask all these classes, to whom
human nature in every station, every degree of
development and form of manifestation, is exposed
what they think of human nature of man's
moral nature* and what are the conclusions which
their " experience " has forced upon them. They will
tell you of a terrible amount of physical and moral
EVIL in existence, and ichich must be dealt with!
Here, perhaps, steps in some philosophical moral-
ist first asking, how do you account for the exist-
ence of it ? and by and by another, complacently
affirming, by a process of his own, that that sup-
posed evil does not exist. Here we are deluged
by a tide of disputation, which too often carries
off and drowns those whom it overtakes. But
there is also a kindred question attended with
similar results: the human WILL or liberty of
action. Is there, asks another philosopher, such a
thing as the Will? Can it act freely? Or is
its action absolutely mechanical and necessary ?
What, then, are motives? And are men, in fact,
mere machines? And, if so, what becomes of re-
sponsibility ? On these questions the two mighty
114 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
problems of moral science has mere physical
science cast a single ray of light? In spite of
some dreams of the day, it may be answered,
peremptorily, No. And is it to be told to those
who come after us, that in England, in our sup-
posed noontide splendour of intellect, in this nine-
teenth century, there are some who, to solve these
questions, have at length nestled themselves in the
absurd and impious old notion of PANTHEISM, and
affect to believe that the universe itself constitutes
God ? That that awful word represents only the
aggregate of everything that exists that whatever
is, is God, a substance for ever the same, and
everything in existence only a necessary succession
of its modes of being ! Some of you will be sur-
prised, perhaps, to hear that there are certain so-
called philosophers of the present day, who seriously
avow these notions; and in doing so, unavoidably
remind us of some who, professing themselves to be
wise, became fools.
It would be a vain, disheartening, humiliating
attempt to exhibit the vagaries of the human in-
tellect, in both ancient and modern times, when
essaying to deal with these matters. I shall, for
my present purpose, divide all existing schools of
moral philosophy into two only : that which im-
plicitly or professedly rejects Revelation; and that
whose doctrines are implicitly based upon it, and
may be designated as constituting Christian moral--
OP THE PRESENT AGE. 115
ity. The former offers a scheme of conduct, and
of motives and sanctions producing it, independently
of, and in contradistinction to, those disclosed by
the Holy Scriptures; the other, a system based
upon them exclusively. The one discards Revela-
tion ; the other necessarily discards that which
discards Revelation.*
Before proceeding further, in order to do justice
between the rival systems, let one give up to the
other all that it has derived from that other. Let
the Bible be supposed banished from among man-
kind, and be as though it had never existed ; but
with it must also disappear every ray of light which
it has ever emitted, and glistened never so faintly
through the mist of mythology not merely all that
is thought to have been derived, but all that has in
fact been derived from that radiant source. This
must be insisted upon rigorously, as the condition of
the argument. But then where are we ? To me it
seems as though a sun had suddenly fallen from
the moral firmament; and all is darkness indeed
all relating to the present, the past, and the future ;
and in that darkness we grope about hopelessly.
We know not how, or why, we were created, nor by
* To a revelation there must be two parties he who makes it,
and he to whom it is made. If there be a revelation, the discard-
ing it is surely a fearful matter. We have inspired authority for
holding that those whom Revelation has not reached, have the law
of human action written in their hearts their conscience also bear-
ing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else ex-
cusing one another.
116 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
whom ; we can account for nothing satisfactorily
only blindly guessing ; and as for the future, it is a
hideous blank to us. We may have vague and
perhaps torturing fears from it, but no hopes ; we
can look only at a puzzling present, in which no
man has a right to dictate to another; but might is
right, and right and wrong are notions of eternal
fluctuation with circumstances. We seem to be
unable to act otherwise than as we do ; we cannot
help ourselves ; we have passions and appetites to
gratify, and will do so whenever we can ; our only
motives are derived from the intensity of those pas-
sions and appetites, and we have no time to lose, as
life is short : so, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die all dying alike, young, old, rich, poor,
good, bad; if, however, we annex any ideas to such
distinctions. What right, let me ask, have we to
slaughter the animals, apparently equally adapted
with ourselves to their respective elements, and
with equal means of enjoyment ? And what con-
ception could men form, under these circumstances,
of an Almighty Maker?
In this benighted and bewildered state, let the
Bible reappear, with all its teachings and revela-
tions, and a flood of holy light flows from it on
man and everything about him. It is absolutely
alone in its pretensions to AUTHORITY as having
come from the First Cause of all things, and con-
OP THE PRESENT AGE. 117
demning every other relation as an imposture.*
It opens at once to our view our past and our
future our origin and our destiny ; that we con-
sist of an immortal soul joined to a mortal body :
tells us what are our present condition and rela-
tions, not only towards each other, but towards
God ; what are the rules of our conduct to be ob-
served on earth, as conditions of an after-existence;
how evil came into the world, and how its conse-
quences are to be dealt with and obviated ; that the
intellect and heart of man are not as originally
created, but the former is clouded, and the latter
corrupted ; but that God has not left himself
without witness, and has implanted in every man a
sense of right and wrong a conscience, however
its functions may be disturbed and vitiated by evil
habits ; that He himself once, in fulfilment of pre-
diction and promise, appeared upon earth for a
while, abolishing death, and bringing life and
immortality to light ; that, after death, man shall
* " There is one primary and capital mark of distinction," says
Bishop Warburton, " differing Judaism from all other forms of re-
ligion ; it professes to come from the First Cause of all things, and
it condemns every other religion for an imposture. There is nothing
more surprising in all Pagan antiquity, than that, amidst then- end-
less [alleged] revelations, not one of them ever made such pretensions
as these ; yet there is nothing which modern writers are more apt to
pass over without reflection. The ancient fathers, however, more
nearly acquainted with the state of paganism, regarded it with the
attention due to so extraordinary a circumstance." Divine Legation
of Moses, book iv. 1.
118 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
rise, and receive judgment for the deeds done in
the body a judgment finally determining an eter-
nal condition ; that our Maker benignantly regards
us as a father his children, with whom he deals
tenderly, but equitably ; that he desires the love of
our whole heart and soul that we should strive to
be pure and holy, as He is; and, finally, sums up
our duty in words which none but a debased heart
can disregard He hath shewed thee, man I
what is good; and what doth He require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God ?
This is essentially, but in brief, the sublime code
of Christian Ethics adapted to the nature of uni-
versal man, addressing itself authoritatively to his
moral nature, prescribing no rules for his conduct
the propriety of which that nature does not recog-
nise ; but, I repeat it again, speaking all this in
a voice of paramount awful Authority yet one
which man is at liberty to disobey, at his peril.
Now, with this code I, for one, as a poor unworthy
worm of the earth, am entirely satisfied. I feel
that, in proportion as I attempt and seriously strive
to come up to its requirements, my moral and
intellectual nature becomes dignified and happy ;
and that I exhibit the highest qualities of that
restored nature, exactly at the point where, unable
by searching to find Him out, I trust in Him, I
believe Him, implicitly.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 119
Stepping, for a moment, out of the sunlight of
this sublime system, I feel myself lowered, per-
plexed, disheartened, and in despair. The sum of
all its teaching is, at one time, that I am a mere
machine ; at another, that I am impelled by no
motives except those petty ones supplied by the
apparent expediencies of this transient life only,
and complicated calculations as to the tendency
of my actions to secure a moment's pleasure or
happiness, or contribute apparently to such in
others. I am wholly dissevered from a future
state ; the grave sees the last of me ; my inward
sense of right and wrong is extinguished ; consci-
ence, in its character of witness, accuser, judge, is
expelled from its seat, and its very existence alleged
to be a dream and a figment. Those, moreover,
who would thus denude rne of my moral dignity,
and annihilate those noble motives by which I
would fain regulate my conduct, treat the source
from which I derive them as a mere tissue of
fictions and delusions, unworthy of being for a
moment entertained by an enlightened intellect,
in an enlightened age.
A French gentleman, M. Proudhon, who aspires
to the character of a philosopher, has recently given
out, with what one cannot but regard as an impious
complacency, that the age has altogether outgrown
Christianity, which, it seems, has " culminated,"
" hastes to her setting," and will soon " vanish
120 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
away."* Is, then, the intellectual and moral pro-
gress of mankind to achieve, as one of its earliest
trophies, the extinction of Christianity? of that
religion which is now supreme in its hold of the
intellect of all the most highly civilised nations of
the earth ? Where are to be found the proofs of
this assertion of a presumptuous infidelity ? Is not
the Christian religion being at this moment rapidly
propagated over the whole earth? And well it
may. If its divine pretensions are to be judged of
by tendencies and results, must not the bitterest
enemy of Christianity admit that, were its pure and
holy doctrines universally recognised and acted
upon, the earth would have become a moral para-
dise? Envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitable-
ness, with every ill they induce all fraud, hypo-
crisy, falsehood, violence, and lust would they
not be extinguished ? Where would be cruelty,
oppression, murder, war? If we are to know the
tree ly its fruits, have we not here, indeed, as it
were, the tree of moral life, and regeneration of our
species ? Remove this tree, and what have we in
its place ? Are we to be left to the fluctuations and
contradictory theories and systems of so-called moral
philosophers, based on the imaginary fitness of
things, and the exclusive adjustment of man to his
present state of existence? Whatever I have read of
* See Reason and Faith an admirable little discourse, by Henry
Rogers.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 121
these theories, compels me to compare all anti or
/ion-Christian schemes of morality, to mere charnel-
houses of decayed and decaying opinions, exhibit-
ing, at long intervals, new forms of putrescent
vitality. As they repudiate conscience, so they
disregard the heart, with all its excellences, vices,
and susceptibilities ; and yet it is with the heart
man believeth unto righteousness ! It is this act of
belief, however, potent and glorious as it is, that
some schools of modern philosophy would treat
with contempt, and restrain every tendency to-
wards it !
A writer of the present day, and an active up-
holder of what is called the philosophy of Utility
which, as I understand it, seems a dreary doctrine
truly, and palsying the noblest sentiments of our
nature in recently advocating its pretensions as the
only true system of ethics, spoke sarcastically of
all clerical academical teachers of morals, as having
an interest in propping up doctrines to which they
are pledged, and fitting their philosophy to them,
for that unworthy purpose. He proceeds to say,
that " the doctrines of the Established Church
are prodigiously in arrear of the general progress
of thought, and that the philosophy resulting,
will have a tendency not to promote, but to arrest
progress. 1 ' This is a confident assertion, levelled
virtually at all systems of Christian ethics, if based,
as are those of the Church of England, on the
122 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Long may
those doctrines, the doctrines of all Christians,
continue " prodigiously in arrear of the general
progress of thought," if that progress be in the
direction of materialism, fatalism, pantheism, or
atheism, [I am far, however, from imputing such
tendencies to the writer in question, whoever
he may be,] in whatever guise it may present
itself. Were such to be, indeed, the tendencies
of the age, it would be in its dotage, its second
childhood. Of this, however, there is no fear ;
for I do believe the enlightened convictions of
the age to be Christian ; and that, if there were
now among us the giant spirits of a former day
as there assuredly are their giant disciples a
Bacon, a Newton, a Butler they would be, as
those were, reverent believers in Christianity. I can
conceive of no degree of intellectual advancement
going beyond Christianity. The very idea con-
tradicts all my views of its essential, its divine
character and original ; and I, for one, never can
help denouncing any attempt to insinuate notions
to the contrary, by constructing systems of morality
silently superseding the doctrines of that Chris-
tianity. I would have the test always to be, Does
your system recognise, or repudiate, Christianity ?
and if the latter, unhesitatingly discard the system.
No one pretends that revelation does not present
speculative difficulties to one disposed to look for
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 123
them, especially in a spirit of supercilious inquisi-
tiveness, and a haughty reliance upon supposed in-
tellectual strength ; but they do not disturb him
who reflects, with Butler, that those difficulties may
have been ordained, and who possesses that univer-
sal solvent of doubt and difficulty, a submission and
resignation to the Divine will a faith in revela-
tion, and the Omnipotence from which it emanated.
The FAITH of the Christian is a potent reality ; as
much so in the spiritual, as attractive in the natu-
ral world. If the two things may be in any re-
spect compared, it may be said to be the force which
attracts the soul of man to the Deity, as to its
proper centre. One who possesses it says, that
revelation, whatever be its alleged difficulties
and it professes to contain things passing man's
understanding comes to him accredited by such an
accumulation of evidence as overpowers all rational
doubts, far transcending any amount of evidence on
which he would unhesitatingly act in the most im-
portant affairs of life. All evidence seems to me
nugatory, if that which supports revelation has
served only to deceive honestly exercised faculties,
having been permitted impious supposition ! by
a wise and gracious Providence to be arrayed in
support of falsehood ! But if one cannot entertain
the hideous supposition, what is one to do ? Yield
assent, and evidence it in his life. We have this
revelation a fact inconceivably momentous. What
124 INTELLECTUAL ANT) MORAL DEVELOPMENT
amount of intellect will suffice to get rid of that
fact ? We must look for an absolute demonstra-
tion of the falsehood of its pretensions satisfying
the reason of all mankind, and compelling them to
surrender their faith in a cunningly-devised fable ;
whereas the discoveries constantly announced, serve
only to corroborate the validity of its external cre-
dentials, while the heart continues in all times and
places to acknowledge the strength of those which
are internal. The Old Testament and the Jews are
both existing among us to this day, as a sun with
its satellites, the one irradiated by the other, and
indicating the existence and character of that other.
That precious Book of books they are still guard-
ing with sleepless vigilance; while "Christianity has
diffused " to quote a distinguished living scholar
and philosopher " over the world, the idea of the
unity of the human race, once the solitary belief of
the Jews, and obscured by their national exclusive-
ness. The historical philosopher, starting from this
idea, has been enabled to view the development of
mankind in this light of Christianity : the noblest
minds of all Christian nations have recognised a
visible and traceable progress of the human race
towards truth, justice, and intelligence."* Such is
Christianity in its glorious mission of evangelisation
of civilising all the nations of the earth. AVith-
* Hippolytus and his Age. By Chev. Bunsen. Vol. ii. p. 4.
(1852.)
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 125
out it, there is no civilisation : or that only which
is, to quote from the same learned person, " an
empty word, and may be, as China and Byzantium
show, a caput ruortuum of real life, a mummy dressed
up into a semblance of living reality." * It is to
Christianity alone that the world was first indebted
for those noble monuments of charity and mercy
which are to be found in our hospitals, infirmaries,
and other similar institutions. Not a trace of them
is to be found among the refined and highly
cultivated Greeks and Romans. The Christian
agencies, now at work to civilise mankind, are
fed direct from the twin founts of inspiration and
morality. They are gradually chasing away the
shadows of ignorance and sensuality, and melting
the manacles and fetters in which cruelty and
vice have bound mankind for ages. " The whole
world will be Japhetised which, in religious
matters, means, now pre-eminently, that it must
be Christianised by the agency of the Teutonic
element. Japhet holds the torch of light, to kindle
the heavenly fire in all the other families of
the one undivided and indivisible human race.f
* Hippolytus and his Age, p. 9.
f* " We think," says a masterly writer in the Quarterly Review,
" there are sufficient grounds, without reference to the sacred
writings, for arriving at the conclusion, that all races and diversi-
ties of mankind are really derived from a single pair ; placed on the
earth for the purpose of peopling its surface, in both the times be-
fore us, and during the ages which it may please the Creator yet to
assign to the present order of existence here." Quarterly Review,
126 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT
Christianity enlightens, and only a small portion of
the globe ; but it cannot be stationary and it will
advance, and is already advancing, triumphantly
over the whole earth, in the name of Christ, and in
the light of the Spirit." * That Christianity has a
vital influence over individuals, and the nations
which they compose. The presence and the absence
of it are equally recognised, seen, and felt.
What will the most delicately-adjusted scheme
of ethics do for a man when the iron is entering his
soul ; when he sees long-cherished hopes blighted ;
when he is tortured by a sense of wrong and in-
justice inflicted upon him ; when some dreadful
incurable disease has settled upon him? Will it
enable him to say, Though He slay me, yet will I
trust in Him ? Will it sustain the sinking soul of
him on whose eyelids is settling the shadow of
death? When we stand with bleeding heart
around the grave, and hear the earth falling on
the coffin of the dear being who cannot hear it,
nor the dread words which accompany it earth
to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust whence
comes the sublime sound, I am the Resurrection,
and the Life, while immortality is glowing around
us, and a voice whispers, in accents of tender ma-
jesty, It is /, be not afraid !
vol. Ixxxvi. pp. 6-7, art. " Natural History of Man." There are
also the strongest philological reasons for believing that all lan-
guages are derivable from one.
* B0NSEN, Hippolytns, ii. 116-17.
OF THE PRESENT AGE. 127
Why am I so importunate on this point ? Be-
cause the Holy Volume, with the morality and
religion which spring from it, is everything or no-
thing to each and every one of us : take it away,
and high as may be the intellectual and moral
development of the present age, neither philoso-
pher nor peasant has anything to supply the place
of that Volume ! Man has lost the only link that
bound him to his Maker : he begins wildly to
doubt His very existence, and the rectitude of His
government : he has no clue through the labyrinth
of life, and sees no adequate purpose of his exis-
tence, nor for his being endowed with such powers,
and capable of such aspirations as are his; he is
drifting about on the vast ocean of being, without
a rudder and without a chart. But give him back
that volume let him hold fast by HIS BIBLE as
the only fixed point when all else is fluctuating
and all is lovely light and order. In that light
let me walk, till I in my appointed time am called
away.
Here we touch the culminating point of all our
inquiries.
Wherefore, friends, farewell. The light of a new
year is already beaming on our brows. May we
all enter, may we all leave it, in a happy and a
high spirit !
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