This view becomes increasingly apparent on examination of the service of this literature to civilization and the individual soul of man, which is the great function of literature, and of its place in the world of art.
"How shall the world be served?" was Chaucer's question; and it has never been absent from any great mind of the English stock. The literature of a nation, however, including, as here, books of knowledge, is so nearly synonymous with the mind in all its operations in the national life, as to be coextensive with civilization, and hardly separable from it. Civilization is cast in the mould of thought, and retains the brute necessity of nature only as mass, but not as surface; it is the flowering of human forces in the formal aspect of life, and of these literature is one mode, reflecting in its many phases all the rest in their manifestations, and inwardly feeding them in their vital principle. The universality of its touch on life is indicated by the fact that it has made the English a lettered people, the alphabet as common as numbers, and the ability to read almost as wide-spread in the race as the ability to count. Its service, therefore, cannot be summarized any more than the dictionary of its words. It is possible to bring within the compass of a paragraph only hints and guide-marks of its work; and naturally these would be gathered from its most comprehensive influences in the higher spheres of intellect and morals, in the world of ideas, and in the person of those writers who were either the founders or restorers of knowledge. Such a cardinal service was the Baconian method, to take a single great instance, which may almost be said to have reversed the logical habit of the mind of Europe, and to have summoned nature to a new bar. It is enough to name this. Of books powerful in intellectual results, Locke's Essay is, perhaps, thought of as metaphysical and remote, yet it was of immeasurable influence at home and abroad, so subtly penetrating as to resemble in scale and intimacy the silent forces of nature. It was great as a representative of the spirit of rationalism, which it supported and spread with incalculable results on the temper of educated Europe; and great also as a product and embodiment of that cold, intellectual habit, distinctive of a certain kind of English mind, and usually regarded as radical in the race. It was great by the variety as well as the range of its influence, and was felt in all regions of abstract thought and those practical arts, education, government and the like, then most affected by such thought; it permanently modified the cast of men's minds. In opposition to it new philosophical movements found their mainspring. A similar honor belongs to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in another century. It is customary to eulogize the pioneer, and to credit the first openers of Californias with the wealth of all the mines worked by later comers; and, in this sense, the words of Buckle, that have been placed opposite the title-page, are, perhaps, to be taken: "Adam Smith contributed more, by the publication of this single work, towards the happiness of men than has been effected by the united abilities of all the statesmen and legislators of whom history has preserved an authentic account." But the excess of the statement is a proof of the largeness of the truth it contains, and like-minded praise is not from Buckle alone, but may be found in half a score of thoughtful and temperate authors. In the last age, Darwin, by his Origin of Species, most arrested the attention of the scientific mind, and stimulated the highly educated world with surprise. He was classed with Copernicus, as having brought man's pretension to be the first of created things, and their lord from the beginning, under the destroying criticism of scientific time and its order, in the same way that Copernicus brought the pretension of the earth to be the centre of the universe under a like criticism of scientific space and its order; and in these proud statements there is some measure of truth. The ideas of Darwin compel a readjustment of man's thoughts with regard to his temporal and natural relation to the universe in which he finds himself; and the vast generalities of all evolutionary thought received from Darwin immense stimulus, its method greater scope, and its results a firmer hold on the general mind, with an influence still unfathomable upon man's highest beliefs with regard to his origin and destiny. There are epochs in the intellectual history of the race as marked as those of the globe; and such works as these, in the literature of knowledge, show the times of the opening of the seals.