But even in that superficial acquaintance which we have had with them in that relation, they have, all the time, been subtly operating upon the minds in contact with them, and perpetually fulfilling the first intention of their Inventor. 'For,' says the great Innovator of the Modern Ages,--the author of the _Novum_ Organum, and of the _Advancement_ of Learning,--in claiming this department of Letters as the necessary and proper instrumentality of a new science,--of a science at least, 'foreign to opinions received,'--as he claims elsewhere that it is, under all conditions, the inevitable essential form of this science in particular. 'Men have proposed to answer two different and contrary ends by the use of parables, for they serve as well to _instruct_ and _illustrate_ as to _wrap up and envelope_, so that, though for the present, we drop the concealed use, and suppose them to be _vague undeterminate things_, formed for AMUSEMENT merely, still the other _use_ remains. 'And every man of _any_ learning must readily concede,' he says, 'the value of that use of them as a method of popular instruction, grave, sober, exceedingly useful, and sometimes necessary in the _sciences_, as it opens an easy and _familiar_ passage to the human understandings in _all new_ discoveries, that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar opinion. They were used of old by _philosophers_ to express any point of reason more sharp and subtle than the vulgar, and nevertheless _now_, and _at all times_, these allusive parabolical forms retain much life and vigor, because _reason_ cannot be _so sensible_ nor _examples so fit_.' That philosophic use of them was to inform and teach, whilst the minds of men continued rude and unpractised in matters of subtilty and speculation, and even impatient and in a manner incapable of receiving anything that did not directly fall under and strike the senses. 'And, even to this day, if any man would let new light in upon the human understanding, and conquer prejudices without raising animosities, opposition, or _disturbance_, he must still go in _the same path_ and have recourse to the like method.' That is the use which the History and Fables of the New Philosophy have already _had_ with us. We have been feeding without knowing it, on the 'principal and supreme sciences'--the 'Prima Philosophia' and its noblest branches. We have been taking the application of the Inductive Philosophy to the principal concerns of our human life, and to the phenomena of of the human nature itself, as mere sport and pastime; though the precepts concluded, the practical axioms inclosed with it have already forced their way into our learning, for all our learning is, even now, inlaid and glittering with those 'dispersed directions.'