"Perfectly; that since the full recognition of truth is virtue, science is the true end. I hope, I believe, I discern the method by which more and more labour will be withdrawn from the means to be transferred to the end. For a long time past,—ever since I have been in the habit of comparing you and your pursuits with the people about you and their pursuits—ever since I came here,—I have been arriving at my present conviction, that every circumstance of our social condition,—the most trifling worldly interest of the meanest of us,—bears its relation to this great issue, and aids the force of tendency towards it." “You have come hither for something worth gaining, then: it is worth while to cross land and sea for such a conviction. Can I aid you with confirmation from the stars?” "No doubt; for all knowledge, come whence it may,—from incalculable heights or unfathomable depths,—all new knowledge of the forces of nature affords the means of setting free a quantity of human labour to be turned to new purposes. In the infancy of the race, the mind had no instruments but the unassisted hands. By degrees, the aid of other natural forces was called in; by degrees, those forces have been overruled to more and more extended purposes, and further powers brought into subjection, setting free, at every new stage of acquisition, an immense proportion of human labour, and affording a glimpse,—almost too bright to be met by our yet feeble vision,—of times when material production—the means of living, shall be turned over to the machinery of nature, only superintended by man, whose life may then be devoted to science, ‘worthy of the name,’ which may, in its turn, have then become the means to some yet higher end than is at present within our ken." “In those days, then, instead of half-a-dozen labourers being virtuously employed in production for themselves and one unproductive philosopher, the six labourers will themselves have become philosophers, supported and cherished by the forces of nature, controlled by the intellect of perhaps one productive labourer.” “Just so; the original philosopher being the cause of this easy production by his ascertainment of the natural forces in question. This result is merely the protraction of the process which has been going on from the earliest infancy of the race. If Noah, in his first moonlight walk upon Ararat, could have seen mirrored in the watery waste the long procession of gigantic powers which time should lead forth to pass under the yoke of man, would he not have decided (in his blindness to the new future of man) that nothing would be left for man to do?” “Probably. And in order to exhibit to him the whole case, he must be carried forward to man’s new point of view.”