The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 51

THE CURE--PLAN OF INNOVATION--NEW CONSTRUCTIONS.

'Unless these end in matter, and constructions according to true definitions, they are speculative, and of little use.'--_Novum Organum_.

Difficult, then, as the problem of Civil Government appeared to the eye of the scientific philosopher, and threatening and appalling as were those immediate aspects of it which it presented at that moment, he does not despair of the State. Even on the verge of that momentous political and social crisis, 'though he does not need to go to heaven to predict great revolutions and imminent changes,' 'he thinks he sees ways to save us,' and he finds in his new science of Man the ultimate solution of that problem.

That particular and private nature which is in all men, let them re-name themselves by what names they will, that particular and private nature which intends always the individual and private good, has in itself 'an incident towards the good of society,' which it may use as means,--which it must use, if highly successful,--as means to its end. Even in this, when science has enlightened it, and it is impelled by blind and unsuccessful instinct no longer, the man of science finds a place where a pillar of the true state can be planted; even here the scientific light lays bare, in the actualities of the human const.i.tution, a foundation-stone,--a stone that does not crumble--a stone that does not roll, which the state that shall stand must rest on.

Even that 'active good,' which impels 'the troublers of the world, such as was Lucius Sylla, and infinite others in smaller model,'--that principle which impels the particular nature to leave its signature on other things,--on the state, on the world, if it can,--though it is its own end, and though it is apt, when armed with those singular powers for 'effecting its _good_ will,' which are represented in the hero of this action, to lead to results of the kind which this piece represents,--this is the principle in man which seeks an individual immortality, and works of immortal worth for man are its natural and selectest means.

But that is not all. The bettering of _itself_, the perfection of its own form, is, by the const.i.tution of things, a force, a _motive_, an _actual_ 'power in everything that moves.' This is one of the primal, universal, natural motions. It is in the universal creative stamp of things; and strong as that is, the rock on which here, too, the hope of science rests--strong as that is, the pillar of the state, which here, too, it will rear. For to man the highest '_pa.s.sive_ good,' and this, too, is of the good which is 'private and particular,' is, const.i.tutionally, that whereby 'the conscience of good intentions, however succeeding, is a more continual joy to his nature than all the provision--the most luxurious provision--which can be made for security and repose,--whereby the mere empirical experimenter in good will count it a higher felicity to fail in good and virtuous ends towards the public, than to attain the most envied success limited to his particular.

Thus, even in these decried '_private_' motives, which actuate all men--these universal natural instincts, which impel men yet more intensely, by the concentration of the larger sensibility, and the faculty of the n.o.bler nature of their species, to seek their own private good,--even in these forces, which, unenlightened and uncounterbalanced, tend in man to war and social dissolution, or 'monstrous' social combination,--even in these, the scientific eye perceives the basis of new structures, 'constructions according to true definitions,' in which _all_ the ends that nature in man grasps and aspires to, shall be artistically comprehended and attained.

But this is only the beginning of the scientific politician's 'hope.'

This is but a collateral aid, an incidental a.s.sistance. This is the place on his ground-plan for the b.u.t.tresses of the pile he will rear.

There is an unborrowed foundation, there is an internal support for the state in man. For along with that particular and private nature of good, there is another in all men;--there is another motive, which respects and beholds the good of society, not mediately, but directly as _its_ end,--which embraces in its intention 'the form of human nature, whereof we are members and portions, and _not_--not--our own proper, individual form'; and this is the good 'which is in degree the greater and the worthier, because it tends to the conservation and advancement of a more general form.' And this, also, is an _actual_ force in man, proceeding from the universal nature of things and original in that, not in him. This, also, is in the primeval creative stamp of things; and here, also, the science of the interpretation of nature finds in the const.i.tution of man, and in the nature of things, the foundations of the true state ready to its hand; and hewn, all hewn and cut, and joined with nature's own true and cunning hand ere man was, the everlasting pillars of the common-weal.

But in man _this_ law, also,--this law chiefly,--has its _special_, essentially special, development. 'It is much _more_ impressed on man, if he de-_generate_ not.' Great buildings have been reared on this foundation already; great buildings, old and time-honoured, stand on it. The history of human nature is glorious, even in its degeneracy, with the exhibition of this larger, n.o.bler form of humanity a.s.serting itself, triumphing over the intensities of the narrower motivity. It is a species in which the organic law transcends the individual, and embraces the kind; it is a const.i.tution of nature, in which those who seek the good of the kind, and subordinate the private nature to that, are n.o.ble, and chief. It is a species in which the law of the common-weal is for ever present to the private nature, as the law of its own being, requiring, under the pains and penalties of the universal laws of being, subjection.

Science cannot originate new forces in nature. 'Man, while operating, can only apply or withdraw natural forces. Nature, internally, performs the rest.' But here are the very forces that we want. If man were, indeed, naturally and const.i.tutionally, that mere species of 'vermin' which, under certain modes of culture, with great facility he becomes, there would be no use in spending words upon this subject.

Science could not undertake the common-weal in that case. If nature's word had been here dissolution, isolation, single intention in the parts and members of that body that science sought to frame, what word of creative art could she p.r.o.nounce, what bonds of life could she find, what breath of G.o.d could she boast, that she should think to frame of such material the body politic, the organic whole, the living, free, harmonious, triumphant common-weal.

But here are the very forces that we want, blindly moving, moving in the dark, left to intuition and instinct, where nature had provided reason, and required science and scientific art. That has not been tried. And that is why this question of the state, dark as it is, portentous, hopeless as its aspects are, if we limit the survey to our present aids and instrumentalities, is already, to the eye of science, kindling with the aurora of unimagined change, advancements to the heights of man's felicity, that shall dim the airy portraiture of poets' visions, that shall outgo here, too, the world's young dreams with its scientific reality.

There has been no help from science in this field hitherto. The proceeding of the world has been instinctive and empirical thus far, in the attainment of the ends which the complex nature of man requires him to seek. Men have been driven, and swayed hither and thither, by these different and apparently contradictory aims, without any _science_ of the forces that actuated them. Those ends these forces will seek,--'it is their nature to,'--whether in man, or in any other form in which they are incorporated. There's no amount of declamation that is ever going to stop them. The power that is in everything that moves, the forces of universal nature are concerned in the acts that we deprecate and cry out upon. It is the original const.i.tution of things, as it was settled in that House of Commons, to whose acts the memory of Man runneth not, that is concerned in these demonstrations; and philosophy requires that whatever else we do, we should avoid, by all means, coming into any collision with those statutes. 'We must so order it,' says Michael of the Mountain, quoting in this case from antiquity--'we must so order it, as by no means to contend with universal nature.' 'To attempt to kick against natural necessity,' he says in his own name, and in his own peculiar and more impressive method of philosophic instruction--'to attempt to kick against natural necessity, is to represent the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to outkick his mule.' We must begin by distinguis.h.i.+ng 'what is in our power, and what not,' says the author of the Advancement of Learning, applying that universal rule of practice to our present subject.

Here, then, carefully reduced to their most comprehensive form, traced to the height of universal nature, and brought down to the specific nature in man--here, as they lie on the ground of the common nature in man, for the first time scientifically abstracted--are the powers which science has to begin with in this field. The varieties in the species, and the individual differences so remarkable in this kind, are not in this place under consideration. But here is the _common_ nature in this kind, which must make the basis of any permanent universal social const.i.tution for it. Different races will require that their own const.i.tutional differences shall be respected in their social const.i.tutions; and if they be not, for the worse or for the better, look for change. But this is the universal platform that science is clearing here. This is the WORLD that she is concerning herself with here, in the person of that High Priest of hers, who, also, took that to be his business.

Here are these powers in man, then, to begin with. Here is this universal natural predisposition in him, not to subsist, merely, and maintain his form--which is nature's first law, they tell us--but to 'better himself' in some way. As Hamlet expresses it, 'he lacks advancement'; and advancement he will have, or strive to have, if not '_formal_ and _essential_,' then 'local.' He is instinctively impelled to it; and in his ignorant attempt to compa.s.s that end which nature has prescribed to him, the 'tempest of human life' arises.

The scientific plan will be, not to quarrel with these universal forces, and undertake to found society on their annihilation. Science will count that structure unsafe which is founded on the supposed annihilation of these forces in anything that moves. The man of science knows, that though by the predominance of powers, or by the equilibrium of them, they may be for a time, '_as it were_, annihilated,' they are in every creature; and nature in the instincts, though blind, is cunning, and finds ways and means of overcoming barriers, and evading restrictions, and inclines to indemnify herself when once she finds her way again. Instead of quarrelling with these forces, the scientific plan, having respect to the Creating Wisdom in the const.i.tution of man, overlooking them from that height, will thankfully accept them, and make much of them. These are just the motive powers that science has need of; she could not compose her structure without them, which is only the perfecting of the structure which the great Creating Wisdom had already outlined and pre-ordered--not a machine, but a living organic whole.

Science takes this 'piece of work' as she finds him, ready, waiting for the hand of art--imperfect, unfinished, but with the proceeding of nature incorporated in him--with the creative, advancing, perfecting motion, incorporated in him as his essence and law;--imperfect, but with nature working within him for the rest, urging him to self-perfection. She takes him as she finds him, a creature of instinct, but with his large, rich, undeveloped, yet already active nature of reason, and conscience, and religion, already struggling for the mastery, counterbalancing his narrower motivity, holding in check, with n.o.bler intuitions, the error of an instinct which errs in man, because eyes were included in nature's definition of him, as it was written beforehand in her book, her universal book of types and orders--eyes, and not instinct only--'that what he cannot smell out, he may spy into.' 'O'er that art, which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes.' The want of this pre-ordered art is the want here still. The war of the unenlightened instincts is raging here still. That is where the difficulty lies. That same patience of investigation with which science has pursued and found out nature elsewhere--that same intense, indefatigable concentration of endeavour, which has been rewarded with such 'magnitude of effects' in other fields--that same, in a higher degree, in more powerful combinations, proportioned to the magnitude and common desirableness of the object, is what is wanting here. It is the instincts that are at fault here,--'the blind instincts, that seeing reason' should 'guide.'

That is where all the jar and confusion of this great storm begins, that 'continues still,' and blasts our lives, in spite of all the spells that we mumble over it, and in spite of all the magic that all our magicians can bring to bear on it. 'Meagre success,' at least, is still the word here. No wonder that the storm continues, under such conditions. No wonder that the world is full of the uproar of this arrested work, this violated intent of nature. She will storm on till we hear her. Woe to those who put themselves in opposition to her, who think to violate her intent and prosper! 'The storm continues,' and it will continue, p.r.o.nounce on it what incantations we may, so long as the elemental forces of all nature are meeting in our lives, and das.h.i.+ng in blind elemental strength against each other, and the brooding spirit of the social life, the composing spirit of the larger whole, cannot reconcile them, because the voices that are filling the air with the discord of their controversy, and out-toning the noise of this battle with theirs, are crying in one key, 'Let there be darkness here'; because the darkness of the ages of instinct and intuition is held back here, cowering, ashamed, but forbidden to flee away; because the night of human ignorance still covers all this battle-ground, and hides the combatants.

Science is the word here. The Man of the Modern Ages has spoken it, 'and now the times give it proof'; the times in which the methods of earlier ages, in the rapid advancement of learning in other fields, are losing their vitalities, and leaving us without those means of social combination, without those social bonds which the rudest ages of instinct and intuition, which the most barbaric peoples have been able to command. The times give it proof, fearful proof, terrific proof, when the n.o.blest inst.i.tutions of earlier ages are losing their power to conserve the larger whole; when the conserving faith of earlier ages, with its infinities of forces, is fainting in its struggles, and is not supported; and men set at nought its divine realities, because they have not been translated into their speech and language, and think there _is_ no such thing; and under all the exterior splendours of a material civilization advanced by science, society tends to internal decay, and the primal war of atoms.

To meet the exigencies of a crisis like this, it is _not_ enough to call these powers that are actual in the human nature, but which are not yet reconciled and reduced to their true and natural order--it is not enough at this age of the world, at this stage of human advancement in other fields--to call these forces by some general names which include their oppositions, and to require for want of skill that a part of them shall be annihilated; it is not enough to express a strong disapprobation of the result as it is, and to require, in never-so-authoritative manner, that it shall be otherwise.

No matter what names we may use to make that requisition in, no matter under _what_ pains and penalties we require it, the result--whatever we may say to the contrary--the result does not follow. That is not the way. Those who try it, and who continue to try it in the face of no matter what failures, may think it is; but there is a voice mightier than theirs, drowning all their speech, telling us in thunder-tones, that it is not; with arguments that brutes might understand, telling us that it is not!

It is, indeed, no small gain in the rude ages of warring instincts and intuitions, when there is as yet no science to define them, and compare them, and p.r.o.nounce from its calm height its eternal axioms here--when the world is a camp, and hostilities are deified, and mankind is in arms when all the moral terms are still wrapped in the confusion of the first outgoing of the perplexed, una.n.a.lysed human motivity--it _is_ no small gain to get the word of the n.o.bler intuitions outspoken, to get the word of the divine law of man's nature, his _essential_ law p.r.o.nounced--even in rudest ages overawing, commanding with its awful divinity the intenser motivity of the lesser nature--able to summon, in rudest ages, to its ideal heights, those colossal heroic forms, that cast their long shadows over the tracts of time, to tell us what type it is that humanity aspires to. It is no small gain to get these n.o.bler intuitions outspoken in some voice that commands with its authority the world's ear, or ill.u.s.trated in some exemplar that arrests the world's eye, and draws the human heart unto it.

It is no small advance in human history, to get the divine authority of those n.o.bler intuitions, which, in man, antic.i.p.ate speculation, and their right to command the particular motives, recognised in the common speech of men, incorporated in their speculative belief, incorporated in their books of learning, and embalmed in inst.i.tutions that keep the divine exemplar of the human form for ever in our eyes.

It _is_ something. The warring nations war on. The world is in arms still. The rude instincts are not stayed in their intent. They pause, it may be; 'but a roused pa.s.sion sets them _new_ a-work.' The speckled demons, that the degenerate _angelic _nature breeds, put on the new livery, and go abroad in it rejoicing. New rivers of blood, new seas of carnage, are opened in the new name of peace; new engines of torture, of fiendish wrong, are invented in the new name of love. But it _is_ some gain. There is a new rallying-place on the earth for those who seek truly the higher good; at the foot of the new symbol they recognise each other, they join hand in hand, and the bands of those who wait and watch amid the earth's darkness for the promise, cheer us with their songs. Truths out of the Eternal Book, truths that all hearts lean on in their need, are spoken. Words that shall never pa.s.s away, sweet with the immortal hope and perennial joy of life, are always in our ears.

The nations that have contributed to this result in any degree, whether primarily or secondarily, whether they be Syrians or a.s.syrians, Arabs or Egyptians, wandering or settled, wild or tame; whether they belong to the inferior una.n.a.lysing Semitic races, or whether they come of the more richly endowed, but yet youthful, Indo-European stock; whether they be Hebrews or Persians, Greeks or Romans, will always have the world's grat.i.tude. Those to whose intenser conceptions and bolder affirmations, in the rude ages of instinct and spontaneous allegation, it was given to p.r.o.nounce and put on everlasting record, these primal truths of inspiration,--truths whose divinity all true hearts respond to, may be indeed by their natural intellectual characteristics,--if _Semitic_ must be--totally disqualified by ethnological laws,--hopelessly disqualified--so hopelessly that it is to lose all to put it on them--for the task of commanding, in detail, our modern civilization;--a civilization which has made, already, the rude ethics of these youthful races, when it comes to details, so palpably and grossly inapplicable, that it is an offence to modern sensibility to name--to so much as name--decisions which stand unreversed, without comment, in our books of learning. But that is no reason why we should not take, and thankfully appropriate as the gift of G.o.d, all that it was their part to contribute to the great plot of human advancement. We cannot afford to dispense with any such gain. The movement which respects the larger whole, the divine intent incorporates it all.

'j.a.phet shall dwell in the tents of Shem,' for they are world wide; but woe to him if, in his day, he refuse to build the temple which, in his day, his G.o.d will also require of him. Woe to him, if he think to put upon another age and race the tasks which his Task-Master will require of him,--which, with his many gifts, with his chief gifts, with his ten talents, will surely be required of him. More than his fathers' woe upon him--more than that old-world woe, which he, too, remembers, if he think to lean on Asia, the youthful Asia, when his own great world noon-day has come.

'There was violence on the earth in those days, and it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth.' 'Twill come,' says our own poet, prefacing his proposal for a scientific art in the attainment of the chief human ends, and giving his ill.u.s.trated reasons for it,--

'Twill come [at this rate]

Humanity must, perforce, prey on itself, Like _monsters_ of the _deep_.

But what are _these_?--these new orders,--these new species of nature, defying nature, that we are generating with our arts here now? What are these new varieties to which our kind is tending now? Look at this kind for instance. What are these? Define them. Destroyers, not of their own image in their fellow-man only, not of the image of their kind only,--sacred by natural universal laws,--but of the chosen image of it, the ideal of it, the one in whom the natural love of their kind was by the law of nature concentred,--the wife and the mother,-- destroyed not as the wolf destroys its prey, but with ferocity, or with prolonged and studious harm, that it required the human brain to plan and perpetrate. Look at this pale lengthening widening train of their victims. We must look at it. It will never go by till we do. We shall have to look at it, and consider it well; it will lengthen, it will _widen_ till we do:--ghastly, bruised, bleeding, trampled,-- trampled it may be, with nailed, booted heel, mother and child together into one grave. But _these_ are common drunkard's wives;--we are inured to this catastrophe, and do not think much of it. But who are _these_, whom the grave cannot hold; that by G.o.d's edict break its bonds and come back, making day hideous, to tell us what the earth could not, would not keep,--to tell us of that other band who died and made no sign? But this is nothing. Here are more. Here are others.

What are these? These are not spectres. _Their_ cheeks are red enough.

What loathsome thing is this, that we are bringing forth here now with the human face upon it, in whom the heart of the universal nature has expired. These are murderers,--count them--they are all murderers, wholesale murderers, perhaps,--but of what? Of their own helpless, tender, loving, trusting little ones. The wretched children of _our time_,--alone in wretchedness,--alone in the universe of nature,--who found, where nature promised them a mother's love, the knife, or the more cruel agonizing drug of death. Was there any cause in nature for it? Yes. They did it for the 'burial fee,' perhaps, or for some other cause as good. They had a reason for it. Let our naturalists throw their learning 'to the dogs,' and come this way, and tell us what this means. Nay, let them bring their books with them, and example us with its meaning if they can. Let them tell us what 'depth' in which nature hides her failures, or yet unperfected hideous germinations,--what formation in which she buries the kinds she repents that she has made upon the earth, or what 'deep'--what ocean cave of 'monsters' we shall drag to find our kindred in _these_ species. Let our wise men tell us whether there be, or whether there ever was, any such thing as this in nature before. If 'such things are,' or have been in any other kind, let them produce the instances, and keep us in countenance and console us for our own.

Let them look at that murderer too, and interpret _him_ for us. For he too is waiting to be interpreted, and he will wait till we understand his signs. He is speaking mute nature's language to us; we must get her key. Look at him as he stands there in the dark, subordinating that faculty which comprehends the whole, which recognises the divinity of his neighbour's right, to his fiendish end: preparing with the judgment of a man his little piece of machinery, with which he will take, as he would take a salmon, or a rat, his fellow-man. Look at him as he stands there now, listening patiently for your steps, waiting to strangle you as you go by him unarmed to-night, confiding in your fellow-man; waiting to drag you down from all the hopes and joys of life, for the sake of the loose coin, gold or silver, which he thinks he may find about you,--_perhaps_. 'How to KILL _vermin_ and how to PREVENT the _fiend_,' was Tom's study. How to dispatch in the most agreeable and successful manner, creatures whose notions of _good_ are const.i.tutionally and diametrically opposed to the good of the larger whole, who have no sensibility to that, and no faculty whereby they perceive it to be the worthier; that is no doubt one part of the problem. The scientific question is, whether this creature be really what it seems, a new and more horrid kind of beast--a demoralization and deterioration of the human species into that. If it be, let our naturalists come to our aid here also, and teach us how to hunt him down and despatch him, with as much respect to the natural decencies which the fact of the external human form would seem still to exact from us, as the circ.u.mstances will admit of. Is it the beast, or is it 'the fiend?'--that is the question. The fiend which tells us that the angelic or divine nature is there--there still--overborne, trampled on, '_as it were_, annihilated,' but lighting that gleam of 'wickedness,'--making of it, not instinct, but crime. Ah! we need not ask which it is. This one has told his own story, if we could but read it. He has left--he is leaving all the time, contributions, richest contributions to our natural history of man,--that history which must make the basis of our arts of cure. He was a wolf when you took him; but in his cell you found something else in him--did you not?--something that troubled and appalled you, with its kindred and likeness, and its exaction on your sympathy. When you hung him as you would _not_ hang a dog;--when you put him to a death which you would think it indecent and inhuman to award to a creature of another species, you did not find him _that_. The law of the n.o.bler nature lay in him as it were annihilated; _he_ thought there was no such thing; but when nature's great voice was heard without also, and those 'b.l.o.o.d.y instructions he had taught returned to him'; when that voice of the people, which was the voice of G.o.d to him, echoed with its doom the voice within, and 'sweet religion,' with its divine appeals--'a rhapsody of words' no longer, came, to second that great argument,--the blind instincts were overpowered in him, the lesser usurping nature was dethroned,--the angelic nature arose, and had _her_ hour, and shed parting gleams of glory on those fleeting days and nights; and he came forth, to die at last, not dragged like a beast--with a manly step--with heroic grandeur, vindicating the heroic type in nature, of that form he wore,--vindicating the violated law, accepting his doom, bowing to its ignominy, a man, a member of society,--a reconciled and accepted member of the commonweal.

How to _prevent_ the fiend? _is_ the question. Ah! what unlettered forces are these, unlearned still, with all our learning, that the dark, unaided wrestling hour 'in the little state of man,' leaves at the head of affairs there, seated in its chair of state, crowned, 'predominant,' to speak the word of doom for us all. 'He poisons him in the garden for his estate.' 'Lights, lights, lights!' is the word here. There _is_ a cause in nature for these hard hearts, but it is not in the const.i.tution of man. There _is_ a cause; it is nature herself, crying out upon our learning, asking to be--interpreted.

Woe for the age whose universal learning is in forms that move and command no longer; that move and bind no longer with _fear_, or _hope_, or _love_, 'the common people.' Woe for the people who think that the everlasting truths of being--the eternal laws of science--are things for saints, and schoolmasters, and preachers only,--the people who carry about with them in secret, for week-day purposes, Edmund's creed, to whom nature is already 'their G.o.ddess, and their law,' ere they know her or her law--ere the appointed teacher has instructed them in it,--ere they know what divinity she, too, holds to,--ere the interpreter has translated into her speech, and evolved from her books, the old truths which shall not--though their old '_garments_'

should '_be changed_'--which _shall not_ pa.s.s away. Woe for the nations in whom that greater part that carries it, are G.o.dless, or whose vows are paid in secret to Edmund's G.o.ddess,--whose true faith is in appet.i.te,--who have no secret laws imposed on that. 'Woe to the people who are in such a case,' no matter on which side of the ocean they may dwell, in the old world, or a new one; no matter under what political const.i.tutions. No matter under what favourable external conditions, the national development that has that hollow in it, may proceed; no matter under what glorious and before unimagined conditions of a healthful, n.o.ble human development that development may proceed. Alas! for such a people. The rulers may cry 'Peace!' but there is none. And, alas! for the world in which such a power is growing up under new conditions, and waxing strong, and preparing for its leaps.

As a principle of social or political organisation, there is no religion,--there never has been any,--so fatal as none. That is a truth of which all history is an ill.u.s.tration. It is one which has been ill.u.s.trated in the history of modern states, not less vividly than in the history of antiquity. And it will continue to be ill.u.s.trated, on the same grand scale, in those terrific evils which the dissolution, or the dissoluteness of the larger whole creates, whenever the appointed teachers of a nation, the inductors of it into its highest learning, lag behind the common mind in their interpretations, and leave it to the people to construct their own rude 'tables of rejections'; whenever the practical axioms, which are the inevitable vintage of these undiscriminating and fatally false rejections, are suffered to become history.

'Woe to the land when its _king_ is a child'; but thrice woe to it, when its teacher is a child. Alas! for the world, when the pabulum of her youthful visions and antic.i.p.ations of learning have become meat for men, the prescribed provision for that nature in which man must live, or 'cease to be,' amid the sober realities of western science.

'Thou shouldst not have been OLD _before thy time_.'

'The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And 'gins to pale his _ineffectual_ fire.'

CHAPTER XI.

THE CURE--NEW CONSTRUCTIONS--THE INITIATIVE.

_Pyramus_.--'Write me a prologue, and let the prologue _seem to say, we will do no harm_ with our _swords_ [spears]... and for the more better a.s.surance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will put them out of fear.'--_Shake-spear_.

'Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spoke them first, than his who spoke them after. Who follows another follows nothing, finds nothing, seeks nothing.'

'Authors have hitherto communicated themselves to the people by some _particular_ and _foreign_ mark. _I_, the first of any, by my _universal being. Every man_ carries with him _the entire form_ of human condition.'

'And besides, though I had a _particular_ distinction _by myself_, what can it distinguish when I am no more? Can it point out and favor _inanity_?'

'_But_ will thy manes such a gift bestow _As to make violets from thy ashes grow_?'

_Michael de Montaigne_.

_Hamlet_.--'To thine own self be true, And it doth follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man.'

'To know a man well, were to know him-self.'

The complaint of the practical men against the philosophers who make such an outcry upon the uses and customs of the world as they find it, that they do not undertake to give us anything better in the place of them; or if they do, with their terrible experiments they leave us worse than they find us, does not apply in this case. Because this is science, and not philosophy in the sense which that word still conveys, when applied to subjects of this nature. We all know that the scientific man is a safe and brilliant pract.i.tioner. The most unspeculative men of practice have learned to prefer him and his arts to the best empiricism. It is the philosophers we have had in this field, with their rash antic.i.p.ations,--with their unscientific pre-conceptions,--with a _pre-conception_, instead of a fore-knowledge of the power they deal with, commanding results which do not,--there is the point,--which do not follow.