AMERICAN INSTITUTE, 59 



their application, is so intimate that it might be traced in a thou- 

 sand instances. The only difficulty is in the selection. The 

 magnet, in the hands of one of the sages of antiquity, would have 

 remained a mere curiosity. But the compass was invented pre- 

 cisely when the world was emerging from the old philosophy, and 

 the instantaneous reward of the examination and application of 

 the magnet was the discovery of America and the passage round 

 the Cape to India. Now, if a new world had not been thus 

 opened, if cotton had never been exported to England, and iron 

 for her railways been sent in return, not only would millions on 

 both sides the water have been left without profitable exchange 

 of labor, but the masses of mankind would have been worse 

 clothed than the serfs of the middle ages, and the scanty and 

 expensive quantity of " fine linen " would have been monopo- 

 lized by the rich as effectually as when manufactured by hand 

 labor in the days of Solomon. 



The boast of the ancient philosophers was, tliat their teachings 

 formed the minds of men to a high degree of wisdom and virtue. 

 What that was, may be well ascertained from that authentic por- 

 traiture of the morals and manners of the classic world left on 

 record by that polished scholar, Paul, in the opening section of 

 his epistle to the Romans, as well as from the concurrent voice of 

 all profane history. The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to 

 exalt man into a God, but it was based upon absolute ignorance 

 of human nature, ignorance that gained nothing by its own specu- 

 lations. The aim of the modern philosophy and the secret of its 

 success has been to provide man with what he requires while he 

 continues to be man. 



The philosophy of the ancients began in words and ended in 

 words, in speculations so abstract that their unintelligible 

 obscurity can pass for sublimity only upon minds incapable of 

 forming an estimate of the actual value of what is presented. 



But modern science owes all her triumphal acquisitions to the 

 fact of her character as modern. Discarding all hypothesis, the 

 firm footing of each inductive step gave to Laplace the law of 

 planetary motion; to Dalton, the fact and the consequences of 

 the combination of the ultimate atoms of matter in unalterable and 



