AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 57 



for modern ages to dwell upon the fact that " all our knowledge 

 is derived from experience;" and while the philosophers of Greece 

 and Rome were wasting their energies in abstract metaphysical 

 enquiries, the world, as to any practical advance in useful know- 

 ledge, was standing still. The scholastic learning of the middle 

 ages was merely the acquisition of an intimate acquaintance with 

 the creatures of the imagination of Plato or Pyrrho, or with the 

 systematic reveries of Aristotle and his followers. In later days 

 Locke, Beattie, Reid and Dugald Stewart have endeavored to 

 ascertain and define the amount and value of the researches of 

 the elder metaphysicians, but, like the attempt to extract " sun- 

 beams from cucumbers," the practical results of such studies, 

 though enveloped in the learned dust of ages, are more glittering 

 than valuable. It was well said as to the definition of the term 

 " metaphysical science," that when one man was talking obscurely 

 about what he did not and could not comprehend, and another 

 did not understand him, he was talking " metaphysics." There 

 is some truth in this popular witticism. The great defect in the 

 philosophy of the ancient world was, that though it might by 

 transmission deserve the name of learning, it scarcely deserved 

 in any age the name of knowledge, that is, as we understand the 

 terms, applying it to something we can reduce to useful practice. 

 It was not until Bacon and Newton gave a new direction to human 

 intellect, that the age of progress was fully inaugurated. The 

 Greeks and Romans were learned and polished in a species of 

 intellectual gladiatorship, and they excelled, as we have seen, in 

 the cultivation of human genius as developed in many branches 

 of the fine arts. But in this they differed from the moderns, 

 namely, that their ignorance of the works of nature and of the 

 laws which are impressed upon the material universe were not 

 . only extreme, but more than this; they sought to interpret the 

 facts impressed upon tte senses by the aid of preccnceived theories. 

 They failed to question nature aright. The universe of matter is 

 made up of facts, which, observed, traced out, arranged, lead up 

 to the knowledge of certain laws and forces, of which all true and 

 practical science is but the exposition. Of science based upon 

 such grounds, whatever might have been their intellectual inge- 

 nuity, the ancients were profoundly ignorant. 



