r
his pen: he does not disdain their significance, but rather aids their
influence with all the power which his spasmodic style has given in
drawing our grotesque-loving public to him. We suspect Buckle, and feel
a cheerful sense of Bacon and Comte. In his plea for socialism, for
education, we see the dawn of the ultimate triumph and dignity of labor.
'We shall one day,' he says, 'supersede Politics by Education.' Pause
well here, you who grope forward into the dark future with misgiving and
faithless hearts. This is not the chimerical delusion of a
transcendental philosophy, this death-knell to the Slavery of Ignorance
and Vice. Recognize in it the wide generosity that says with Leczinsky,
_'Je ne connais d'avarice permise que celle du temps_.' Here is wealth
for want, industry for indolence, distinction for degradation, virtue
for vice. It beams clear as the red of morning. Hear it in the whistle
of the engine, the roar of the loom, the plowing of the steam-ship
through battling waves, the tick of the telegraph, the whirr of the mill
wheel, the click of the sewing machine; and he who doubts still may
listen to the voice of cannon, the whistling of lances and the clash of
swords, and catch the notes of the same chant with a sterner chorus.
Hear even the idealist Schelling awaiting that broader freedom than any
we have yet known:--
'The third period in history will be that when that which in preceding
periods appeared as Destiny or Nature, shall develop and manifest itself
as Providence. Thus what seems to us as the work of Destiny or Nature is
already the beginning of a Providence, which reveals itself but
imperfectly. When we shall look for the birth of this period, man can
not say, but know that when it is, _God will be_.'
And Emerson takes up the strain with words of fire:--
'If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; if Want, with his scourge; if
War, with his cannonade; if Christianity, with its charity; if Trade,
with its money; if Art, with its portfolios; if Science, with her
telegraphs through the deeps of space and time, can set man's dull
nerves throbbing, and, by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break
its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free,--make way and
sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out--the age of the brain
and the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we
have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing,
wants all the mater
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