THE OLD PHILOSOPHY. 233 



having discovered the principles of the arch, and the proper 

 use of metals in the arts, — "Philosophy teaches us to be 

 independent of all material substances, of all mechanical con- 

 trivances. The wise man lives according to nature. Instead 

 of attempting to add to the physical comforts of his species, he 

 regrets that he was not cast in that golden age when the human 

 race had no protection against the cold but the skins of wild 

 beasts, no screen from the sun but a cavern. To impute to 

 such a man auy share in the invention or improvement of a 

 plough, a ship, or a mill, is an insult. In my own time, there 

 have been inventions of this sort, — transparent windows, tubes 

 for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building, 

 shorthand, which has been carried to such perfection that a 

 writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the 

 inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves ; 

 philosophy lies deeper. It is not her office to teach men how 

 to use their hands. The object of her lessons is to form the 

 soul : Non est, inquam, instrunentonm ad usus necessarios opi- 

 fex." " We shall next be told," exclaimed he, " that the first 

 shoemaker was a philosopher." It has been well said that in 

 the minds of such men *s he : — " The business of a philosopher 

 was to declaim in pmise of poverty with two millions sterling 

 out at usury; to pieditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils 

 of luxury, in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns ; to 

 rant about Uoerty, tfhile fawning on the insolent and pampered 

 freedmen of a tr ranfc '> to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue 

 with the same pen which had just before written a defence of 

 the murder of a mother by a son." But it was this style of 

 thought «*nd speculation which occupied the attention of the 

 world ibr more than two thousand years. Socrates, Aristotle, 

 Pbco, Seneca, Cicero, all lived in an atmosphere of intellectual 

 superiority, which enabled them to transmit to the student all 

 the sublimity of thought, of which finite man is capable, all 

 the moral elevation which the human heart can reach, all the 

 religious confidence and trust which man can attain unaided 

 by the light of revelation. It is not surprising that through so 

 many ages they should have exercised supreme sovereignty in 

 the kingdom of thought, and that great minds should have 

 followed them, and little minds have been obedient to them. 

 Nor, perhaps, is this a misfortune. For it were not easy to tell 



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