all been once
vitally united with it--have severally served as the protective
envelopes within which a higher humanity was being evolved. They are
cast aside only when they become hindrances--only when some inner and
better envelope has been formed; and they bequeath to us all that there
was in them good. The periodical abolitions of tyrannical laws have left
the administration of justice not only uninjured, but purified. Dead and
buried creeds have not carried with them the essential morality they
contained, which still exists, uncontaminated by the sloughs of
superstition. And all that there is of justice and kindness and beauty,
embodied in our cumbrous forms of etiquette, will live perennially when
the forms themselves have been forgotten.

[1] _Westminster Review_, April 1854.

[2] This was written before moustaches and beards had become common.

ON THE GENESIS OF SCIENCE[1]

There has ever prevailed among men a vague notion that scientific
knowledge differs in nature from ordinary knowledge. By the Greeks, with
whom Mathematics--literally _things learnt_--was alone considered as
knowledge proper, the distinction must have been strongly felt; and it
has ever since maintained itself in the general mind. Though,
considering the contrast between the achievements of science and those
of daily unmethodic thinking, it is not surprising that such a
distinction has been assumed; yet it needs but to rise a little above
the common point of view, to see that no such distinction can really
exist: or that at best, it is but a superficial distinction. The same
faculties are employed in both cases; and in both cases their mode of
operation is fundamentally the same.

If we say that science is organised knowledge, we are met by the truth
that all knowledge is organised in a greater or less degree--that the
commonest actions of the household and the field presuppose facts
colligated, inferences drawn, results expected; and that the general
success of these actions proves the data by which they were guided to
have been correctly put together. If, again, we say that science is
prevision--is a seeing beforehand--is a knowing in what times, places,
combinations, or sequences, specified phenomena will be found; we are
yet obliged to confess that the definition includes much that is utterly
foreign to science in its ordinary acceptation. For example, a child's
knowledge of an apple. This, as far as it goes, consists in previ