lastically
stretching over them? Let our farmer scatter pulverized marble upon his
soil forever,--crude carbonate of lime,--and it remains unassimilated;
but let him powder burnt bones there, and his crop uses it to golden
advantage,--now merely the phosphate of lime, but material that has
passed through the operations of animal life, of organism. With whatever
manure he work his land, be it wood-ashes or guano or compost, he knows
that that which has received the action of organic tissues fattens it
the best; and so a wise man may fertilize to-day better with the facts
of an experience that he has once lived through, than with any vague and
unorganized dreams. But the fool has never lived;--life, said Bichat, is
the totality of the functions;--his past has endured no more
organization than his future has; he never understood it; he can make no
use of it; so he deifies it, and burns the flying moment like a
joss-stick before the wooden image in which he has caricatured all its
sweet and beneficent capabilities;--as if it were likely that one moment
of his existence could be of any more weight than another.

The sentiment which a generation feels for another long antecedent to
itself, is not utterly dissimilar from this. Its individuals being
regarded with the veneration due to parents and due to the dead, it is
forgotten that they were men, and men whose lessons were necessarily no
wiser than those of the men among us; men, too, of no surpassing
humility, since they presumed to prescribe inviolable laws to ages far
wiser than themselves. Yet though the philosophy of the Greek and Roman
were lost, would it need more than the years of a generation to replace
what scarcely can exceed the introspection of a single experience? If
their art were lost, does not the ideal of humanity remain the same so
long as the nature of humanity endures? But of the seven sciences of
antiquity, two alone deserve the name,--their arithmetic and their
geometry. Their music was a cumbrous and complicated machinery, and the
others were exercises of wit and pleasure and superstition. It is true
that the Egyptian excelled, that the Arabian delved somewhat into the
secrets of nature; but who venerates those people, and who spends all
that season in study of their language that he should spend in putting
oxygen into his blood and lime into his bones? The sensuous Greek loved
beauty; he did not care to puzzle his brain when he could please it
instead