“But you have called for an explanation of these principles of ours, and you have a right to obtain it. Our first principle is, then—the reverse of the trite and dull maxim of Pope—‘_Whatever is, is right_’. We contend, that ‘_Whatever is, is wrong_’; that institutions, civil and religious, that social order (as it is called in _your_ cant) and regular government, and law, and I know not what other fantastic inventions, are but so many cramps and fetters on the free agency of man’s _natural intellect_ and _moral sensibility_; so many badges of his degradation from the primal purity and excellence of his nature. “Our second principle is, the ‘_eternal and absolute perfectibility of man_’. We contend, that if, as is demonstrable, we have risen from a level with the _cabbages of the field_ to our present comparatively intelligent and dignified state of existence, by the mere exertion of our own _energies_; we should, if these _energies_ were not repressed and subdued by the operation of prejudice, and folly, by KING-CRAFT and PRIEST-CRAFT, and the other evils incident to what is called civilized society, continue to exert and expand ourselves in a proportion infinitely greater than anything of which we yet have any notion:—in a _ratio_ hardly capable of being calculated by any science of which we are now masters: but which would in time raise man from his present biped state to a rank more worthy of his endowments and aspirations; to a rank in which he would be, as it were, _all_ MIND; would enjoy unclouded perspicacity and perpetual vitality; feed on _oxygene_, and never die, but _by his own consent_. “But though the poem of the PROGRESS OF MAN alone would be sufficient to teach this system and enforce these doctrines, the whole practical effect of them cannot be expected to be produced, but by the gradual perfecting of each of the sublimer sciences;—at the husk and shell of which we are now nibbling and at the kernel whereof, in our present state, we cannot hope to arrive. These several sciences will be the subjects of the several _auxiliary_ DIDACTIC POEMS which I have now in hand (one of which, entitled THE LOVES OF THE TRIANGLES, I herewith transmit to you), and for the better arrangement and execution of which, I beseech you to direct your bookseller to furnish me with a handsome Chambers’s Dictionary; in order that I may be enabled to go through the several articles alphabetically, beginning with _Abracadabra_, under the first letter, and going down to _Zodiac_, which is to be found under the last.