Till now, the philosophers and poetic teachers had always taken their stand at once, on the topmost peak of Olympus, pouring down volleys of scorn, and amazement, and reprehension, upon the vulgar nature they saw beneath, made out of the dust of the ground, and qualified with the essential attributes of that material,--kindled, indeed, with a breath of heaven, but made out of clay,--different kinds of clay,--with more or less of the Promethean spark in it; but always clay, of one kind or another, and always compelled to listen to the laws that are common to the kinds of that substance. And it was to this creature, thus bound by nature, thus _doubly_ bound,--'crawling between earth and heaven,' as the poet has it,--that these winged philosophers on the ideal cliffs, thought it enough to issue their mandates, commanding it to renounce its conditions, to ignore its laws, and come up thither at a word,--at a leap,--making no ado about it.
'I can call spirits from the vasty deep.' 'And so can I, and so can any man;'
'But will they _come?_ _Will they come_--when you do call for them?'
It was simply a command, that this dirty earth should convert itself straight into Elysian lilies, and bloom out, at a word, with roses of Paradise. Excellent patterns, celestial exemplars, of the things required were held up to it; and endless declamation and argument why it should be that, and not the other, were not wanting:--but as to any scientific inquiry into the nature of the thing on which this form was to be superinduced, as to any _scientific_ exhibition of the form itself which was to be superinduced, these so essential conditions of the proposed result, were in this case alike wanting. The position which these reformers occupy, is one so high, that the question of different kinds of soils, and chemical analyses and experiments, would not come within their range at all; and 'the resplendent or lustrous mass of matter,' of which their sciences are compounded, chosen to give glory either to the subtilty of disputations or to the eloquence of discourses, would not bear any such vulgar admixture. It would make a terrible jar in the rhythm, which those large generalizations naturally flow in, to undertake to introduce into them any such points of detail.