WINTER MEETING. 333 



ful is a sentiment; the useful is a thought. The useful is the discovery of the 

 great end and of the good way of arriving at it— the great end of ihe individual 

 life or the nation's liife. This definition places it beyond the reach of the infant, 

 the Indian and the savage, and makes the useful depend wholly upon the method 

 of thought. It requires thought to devise the good end and the discovery of a good 

 way of reaching it. The railway which lies near your city is a good way for carry- 

 ing around men, but that does not make it useful. It must also carry men on good 

 errands or to a good destination. If your railroad were to undertake to-morrow 

 to carry men to a prize-fight, it would be utterly worthless, because men going to a 

 prize-fight would be wicked. Men going to a prize-tight ought to walk through 

 deep mud. Men going to a prize-fight should all die on the road. 



So the useful consists in a good way of reaching a good end. This makes it 

 necessary that the useful be attained only by an age full of thought. Lord Bacon 

 heralded the useful just about as Washington heralded liberty. Bacon did not 

 create the useful, but stood in the midst of it and developed it. He became its 

 speaker, its poet, its prophet. Previous to Lord Bacon the scholars of Europe 

 were alll engaged in abstract thought about themes that had no application to 

 human life. Lecky says that sometimes in Europe there were five thousand schol- 

 ars gathered together in woods and camps for discussion and thought upon themes 

 that had no application to human life. One of their favorite themes was the na- 

 ture of the human spirit, and as to how many spirits could probably dance upon 

 the point of a needle ; and they would also inquire what kind of a club Cain killed 

 Abel with— whether it was hickory, oak or sassafras; and one of those philoso- 

 phers wrote twenty essays on the probable height of the Virgin Mary, the probable 

 size of her hand or foot, and the probable color of her hair. They thought it dis- 

 graceful to come down to the common afiFairs of life. 



And while the men were doing this kind of thinking the women wer^ slaves, 

 doing the drudgery ; and this reaches over the pagan and Christian world up to 

 the Sixteenth century. Xenophon thought the duty of the wife lay in keeping her 

 husbp.nd's clothes mended and clean. Up to the Sixteenth century the women 

 plowed the ground with a crooked stick, the men being far above the considera- 

 tion of doing the plowing. Ihe woman cut the grain with a kind of case-knife ; 

 she threshed the grain with a club; she ground the grain with a couple of rocks; 

 she baked the bread in ashes. And the great man in the meanwhile was busy 

 about the definition of spirit or the origin of the human race, or about the nature 

 of the Deity or the nature of the devil. Into that world came Lord Bacon, simply 

 to turn the attention of men to what are called the common laws of human life. 



But neither the Greek nor the scholastic would ever come near human life. 

 Bacon looks at that scene, and for the first time in the history of human thought he 

 confesses the existence of the cart and the wagon road, the horse and the harness 

 and the cabbages, and he says, " O, foolish human race, why do you not let the 

 angels alone and make a good wagon road ? " He says, " Why not feed that horse ? 

 The collar is made out of straw, the harness is tied together with strings. The 

 Queen of England has just found her chariot mired in the mud, and has stood in the 

 fence-corner while her courtiers pry it out. Why not make a good road ? " 



This is the Baconian philosophy— the study of the phenomena of the diffi- 

 cult, and the educement from the phenomena of general laws. After Bacon had 

 unfolded this philosophy man began to leave the upper air alone and study the sur- 

 face of the earth, and out of this philosophy came wooden rails, on 'which cars 

 were drawn out of the coal mines. They found that one mule could draw four or 

 five cars with wooden rails. Reason made them substitute iron rails. Further 



