that it might heat wells and cure diseases; he brings not up
his quails by the east wind, only to let them fall in flesh about the
camp of men: he has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the
quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven.

Sec. 8. Division of the pursuits of men into subservient and objective.

All science and all art may be divided into that which is subservient to
life, and which is the object of it. As subservient to life, or
practical, their results are, in the common sense of the word, useful.
As the object of life or theoretic, they are, in the common sense,
useless; and yet the step between practical and theoretic science is the
step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the
chemist; and the step between practical and theoretic art is that
between the bricklayer and the architect, between the plumber and the
artist, and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to
greater; so that the so-called useless part of each profession does by
the authoritative and right instinct of mankind assume the superior and
more noble place, even though books be sometimes written, and that by
writers of no ordinary mind, which assume that a chemist is rewarded for
the years of toil which have traced the greater part of the combinations
of matter to their ultimate atoms, by discovering a cheap way of
refining sugar, and date the eminence of the philosopher, whose life has
been spent in the investigation of the laws of light, from the time of
his inventing an improvement in spectacles.

But the common consent of men proves and accepts the proposition, that
whatever part of any pursuit ministers to the bodily comforts, and
admits of material uses, is ignoble, and whatsoever part is addressed to
the mind only, is noble; and that geology does better in reclothing dry
bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and
beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven
than in teaching navigation; botany better in displaying structure than
in expressing juices; surgery better in investigating organization than
in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every
step we make in the more exalted range of science adds something also to
its practical applicabilities; that all the great phenomena of nature,
the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us partly, as
it reveals to farther vision the being