For the times that were 'far off' when that proposition was made, it is brought out anew and reopened. Oh, people of the ages of arts and sciences that are called by this man's name, shall we have the fruits of his new doctrine of KNOWLEDGE, brought to our relief in all other fields, and reject it in this, which he himself laid out, and claimed as its only worthy field? Instructed now in the validity of its claims, by its 'magnitude of effects' in every department of the human practice to which it has yet been applied, shall we permit the department of it, on which _his_ labour was expended, to escape that application? Shall we suffer that wild barbaric tract of the human life which the will and affections of man create,--that tract which he seized,--which it was his labour to collect into an art or science, to lie unreclaimed still?
Oh, Man of the new ages of science, will you have the new fore-knowledge, the magical command of effects, which the scientific inquiry into causes as they are actual in nature, puts into our hands, in every other practice, in every other culture and cure,--will you have the rule of this knowledge imposed upon your fields, and orchards, and gardens, to assist weak nature in her 'conservations' and 'advancements' in these,--to teach her to bring forth here the latent ideals, towards which she struggles and vainly yearns, and can only point to, and wait for, till science accepts her hints;--will you have the Georgics of this new Virgil to load your table with its magic clusters;--will you take the Novum Organum to pile your plate with its ideal advancements on spontaneous nature and her perfections;--will you have the rule of that Organum applied in its exactest rigors, to all the physical oppositions of your life, to minister to your physical safety, and comfort, and luxury, and never relax your exactions from it, till the last conceivable degree of these has been secured; and in this department of art and science,--this, in which the sum of our good and evil is contained,--in a mere oversight of it, in a disgraceful indifference and carelessness about it, be content to accept, without criticism, the machinery of the past--instrumentalities that the unlearned ages of the world have left to us,--arts whose precepts were concluded ages ere we knew that _knowledge_ is power.