forth greater earnestness
and more outward propriety in the whole nation, but it had not
strengthened national union. He who gave himself up to it with zeal,
was in great danger of withdrawing himself, with those who were
like-minded, from the great stream of life, and of looking down from
his solitude, like the shipwrecked man from his island, on the great
waste of waters around him.

The new scientific development also produced, at first, only individual
men of learning; then a free culture; after that a nation, which dared
to struggle and to die, and finally to live, for its independence.

CHAPTER VI.

THE DAWNING OF LIGHT.
(1750.)

From the German cities, on the boundaries betwixt guild labour and free
invention, did the art of printing come into the world--the greatest
acquisition of the human race, after that of the alphabet. The mind of
man could now be conveyed, bound up in wood and leather, upon a
thousand roads at the same time, all over the earth; the powers of man
in church and state, in science and handicraft, were unfolded, not only
more powerfully, more variously, and more richly, but in a totally
different manner from the quiet plodding of the past. A change was
produced in nations in one century which formerly would have taken a
thousand years. Every individual was bound together in one great
intellectual unity with his contemporaries, and every nation with other
civilized nations. For the first time a regular connection in the
intellectual development of the human race was secured. The mind of the
individual will continue to live upon earth perhaps many thousand years
after he has ceased to breathe; but the soul of each individual nation
gains a capacity of renovating itself which will, we hope, remove its
decease, according to the old laws of nature, to an incalculable
distance.

The black art had not been invented many years when a spring-tide arose
in the soul. From the study of the Latin writers, the humanitarians
proclaimed, with transport, how much there had been of the beautiful
and the grand in the ancient world. Eagerly did they maintain the
treasure of noble feelings, which had fallen on their souls from the
distant past, against the coarse or corrupt life that they beheld
around them. With the holy book in their hands, pious ecclesiastics
contended for the words of Scripture, against the desp