PART SECOND. The Future. I. New Era of Society. II. Voluntary Association. III. Supplies the Prima Philosophia. IV. Objections to it. V. The Survey of Science. VI. Review of the Past. VII. Scientific Travellers. XIII. General Society. XIV. Its Influence over Government. XV. Its Influence over Europe. XVI. Advantages of Science to Religion. XVII. Advantages of Religion to Science. PART SECOND. I. ACCORDING to Schelling there are three erás of existence. The first, which is past, was the reign of Chance and Chaos; the second, which now exists, is that of Nature; and the third is, that of an Infinite Mind, which does not yet exist, but will hereafter be developed, and will absorb all finite being. Without entering a verdict of philosophic lunacy against the greatest of living men, as some of his countrymen have called him, or stopping to attend to those fields of science in nubibus, which have been cultivated by the school of Kant with so much diligence, fervour, and selfapplause, it may merely be remarked, that this bright sally of transcendental insanity affords no bad illustration of that which takes place in hu man society. We are now living in the " era of nature," in which the various forms of intellect are developed and flourish; but that general mind is only about to disclose itself, which will embrace, cherish, and reunite all into one limitless and allpervading spirit of intelligence. The whole of the intellectual world is germinant, and a kindly breath might awaken and unfold it; every part of science is susceptive of immediate additions; and, in most cases, the improvement is so obvious of execution, that each labourer might have his part assigned to him, and a tower of observation and intellectual discovery might be raised without delay. If the situation of science is favourable, the situation of England is no less so. No cloud in summer was ever more fully surcharged with electricity than England is with moral energy, which needs but a conductor to issue out in any given direction. England has become the capital of a new moral world-the eminence on which intellectual light strikes before it visits the nations the fountain-head of the rivers that are going forth to water the earth; it is at her option to have well-wishers in every country, and to place herself at the head of the most numerous sect that ever existed, and which is daily increasing the men who are panting for civil and religious liberty. Were Alfred restored to life, as it was once believed of the just, that they should again tread the earth in the latter days, and enjoy the fruits of that which, in their first life, they had planted in equity and righteousness, that peerless king, who, in circumstances desperate, and amid the wreck of affairs, restored England to its former sovereignty, and in the pitchy midnight of the dark ages struck out so many lights that science began to respire, and the mind to awake from its lethargy, could, at this moment, with a touch set the social machine in movement, and perfecting the institutions of his native country, and awakening its genius to new and untried flights, he would be regarded as the universal legislator, from whose hand the earth was to receive new laws, and to whom knowledge would stand revealed in her hidden sources and ultimate powers. Or even were a mind of the first order to arise, though divested of political authority-should an understanding capacious as Aristotle's again traverse over all that was already known, and collecting real observations instead of imaginary powers and qualities, stamp the whole with the impress of his genius, and reduce it, not into an artificial system, but into a correspondency and sympathy with every-day reality, how would each page teem with vitality like nature herself? Not the words alone, as was said of Ulysses' Oratory, would fall thick as the winter snows, but the thoughts also-pressed and condensed together, and each pregnant with new discoveries, as with an ever-fruitful progeny, they would make the reader rich, not in barren syllogisms and endless disputations, but in views which went deep into the nature of things, and possessed an abiding likeness in the world without them, while Aris. totle, no longer reduced to mere heads of lectures, and the skeleton of his warm and living discourses, would appear such as he was, and such as the ancients found him-as eloquent as uni versal, bringing with him all his collected copi. ousness, and pouring down the golden flood of his divine rhetoric, "Veniet aureum fundens Or if Bacon could return to flumen Aristoteles." finish the edifice of which he laid the foundations, or renew the impulse which he first imparted, and with that more than mortal eye which foresaw science before it existed, could survey all its parts, and mark its deficiencies as the ostrich is fabled |