Surveyed from the special point of view furnished by this peculiar
nature of man, unique in creation, all the past of our planet divides
into two periods;--the period, inclusive of every age known to the
geologist, during which only the Creator wrought; and the period during
which man has wrought, and to which all human history belongs. In such a
view we are presented with two sets of works,--those of the
Creator-worker, and those of the creature-worker; and the vast fund of
materials on which the natural theologian frames his arguments
demonstrative of design or contrivance, assumes a new significancy and
interest when employed as evidence that there exists a certain
correspondence of nature and intellect between the two workers, human
and Divine. The ability of accomplishing the same ends by the same
means,--in other words, of thinking and acting in the same practical
tract,--indicates a similarity, if not identity, of intellectual nature.
In the Chinese centre of civilization, for instance, printing,
gunpowder, the mariner's compass, with the various chemical and
mechanical arts of elegant life, were originated without concert with
the European centre of civilization, simply because in China, as in
Europe, the same human faculties, prompted by the same tastes and
necessities, had expatiated in the same tracts of invention, and had, as
a consequence, educed the same results. I was much struck, when spending
half an hour in a museum illustrative of the arts in China, by the
identity of these with our own, especially in the purely mechanical
departments; and again, when similarly employed in that apartment
devoted, in the British Museum, to the domestic utensils of the ancient
Egyptians. The identity of the more common contrivances which I
witnessed, with familiar contrivances in our own country, I regarded as
altogether as conclusive of an identity of mind in the individuals who
had originated them, as if I had actually seen human creatures at work
on them all. One class of productions showed me that the potter's wheel
and the turning lathe had been known and employed as certainly in China
and ancient Egypt as in Britain. Another, that their weaving processes
must have been nearly the same. The Chinese know, for instance, as well
as ourselves, that patterns can be delicately brought out,--as in the
damasks,--without the assistance of color, simply by exposing silken or
flaxen fibre at different angles to the light; an