it would be unwise, were it even possible, to relinquish: but every
thing that tends to clothe it in a strange and repulsive garb, and
especially every thing that, to keep up an appearance of superiority
in its professors over the rest of mankind, assumes an unnecessary
guise of profundity and obscurity, should be sacrificed without mercy.
Not to do this, is to deliberately reject the light which the natural
unencumbered good sense of mankind is capable of throwing on every
subject, even in the elucidation of principles: but where principles
are to be applied to practical uses it becomes absolutely necessary;
as all mankind have then an interest in their being so familiarly
understood, that no mistakes shall arise in their application.
(64.) The same remark applies to arts. They cannot be perfected till
their whole processes are laid open, and their language simplified and
rendered universally intelligible. Art is the application of knowledge
to a practical end. If the knowledge be merely accumulated experience,
the art is _empirical_; but if it be experience reasoned upon and
brought under general principles, it assumes a higher character, and
becomes a _scientific art_. In the progress of mankind from barbarism
to civilised life, the arts necessarily precede science. The wants and
cravings of our animal constitution must be satisfied; the comforts,
and some of the luxuries, of life must exist. Something must be given
to the vanity of show, and more to the pride of power: the round of
baser pleasures must have been tried and found insufficient, before
intellectual ones can gain a footing; and when they have obtained it,
the delights of poetry and its sister arts still take precedence of
contemplative enjoyments, and the severer pursuits of thought; and
when these in time begin to charm from their novelty, and sciences
begin to arise, they will at first be those of pure speculation. The
mind delights to escape from the trammels which had bound it to earth,
and luxuriates in its newly found powers. Hence, the abstractions of
geometry--the properties of numbers--the movements of the celestial
spheres--whatever is abstruse, remote, and extramundane--become the
first objects of infant science. Applications come late: the arts
continue slowly progressive, but their realm remains separated from
that of science by a wide gulf which can only be passed by a powerful
spring. They form their own language and their own conventions, which
none but artists can understand. The whole tendency of empirical
art, is to bury itself in technicalities, and to place its pride in
particular short cuts and mysteries known only to adepts; to surprise
and astonish by results, but conceal processes. The character of
science is the direct contrary. It delights to lay itself open to
enquiry, and is not satisfied with its conclusions, till it can make
the road to them broad and beaten: and in its applications it preserves
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