X PEEFACE. 



tending with difficulties at the out posts, and slowly winning a new 

 magnitude of knowledge, which as soon as it is settled, belongs 

 afresh to the large country of popular common sense. On the con- 

 trary, they allow each party of settlers to hoist the flag of a petty 

 kingdom of their own, without insisting, as ought to be done, that 

 the adventurers shall at once become the colonies of the mother 

 /state. Thus it is that professors of all kinds have kidnapped the 

 sciences, and the people fear to take so much as a walk under the 

 walls of these bristling strongholds. But scientific feudalism is evi- 

 dently about to pass away. 



This desirable result will be accomplished by the growth of large 

 towns, that is to say, popular doctrines, of the sciences, which will 

 belong to the broad industry and insights of mankind, and will not 

 contest, but swallow up, the castles of the present chiefs, and reverse 

 the feodal direction of duties and fines. Already we have seen the 

 process going on in the history of civilization, and we are about to 

 witness the same thing in the progress of science and of thought. 



It may take place somewhat as follows. The masters of science 

 will pursue their own way, warm in their little senates, and cheered 

 by their subjacent schools; satisfied with perfectionating the chairs 

 into which they have been inducted. They will gather useful facts, 

 and more and more comprehensive formulas, and appealing to rarer 

 and rarer qualities in their scholars, be most out of sight when they 

 are most at home, until at length, by extremity of cleverness, th&y 

 will become invisible to all but adepts. Lords of the last ether of 

 things, they will only exist as influences, and not as appreciable 

 substances. In the mean time the people, happily unconscious, will 

 listen to flesh and blood, which seems to talk to them about them- 

 selves. Abstractions will have sailed away to the flying island of 

 the professors, who will exert a strong attraction upon the whole 

 wealth of the world's inanitions. A clear stage and sward of com- 

 mon sense will then be at the popular disposal, and the problem of 

 universal education may be conceived upon new grounds. The 

 safeguard of the people will be this — that when the learned have 

 done their best, it is no matter to them; their hearts will be unse- 

 duced, and their brows unterrified, by the lordliest and most capti- 

 vating formulas. One or two plain Johnsonian stampings on the 



