the beggar,' the actualities which the natural history of man
continues perseveringly to exhibit, in the face of those logical
abstractions and those ideal schemes of man as he should be, which had
been till this time the fruit of learning;--those actualities, those
particulars, whose lowness the new philosophy would begin with, which
the new philosophy would erect into an art or science.
The foundation of this ascent is natural history. There must be
nothing omitted here, or the stairs would be unsafe. The rule in this
School, as stated by the Interpreter in Chief, is, 'that there be
_nothing in the globe of matter_, which should not be likewise in the
globe of _crystal_ or _form_;' that is, he explains, 'that there
should not be anything in _being_ and _action_, which should not be
_drawn_ and _collected_ into _contemplation_ and _doctrine_.' The
lowness of matter, all the capabilities and actualities of speech and
action, not of the refined only, but of the vulgar and profane, are
included in the science which contemplates an historical result, and
which proposes the _reform_ of these actualities, the cure of these
maladies,--which comprehends man as man in its intention,--which makes
the _Common Weal_ its end.
Science is the word that unlocks the books of this School, its gravest
and its lightest, its books of loquacious prose and stately allegory,
and its Book of Sports and Riddles. Science is the clue that still
threads them, that never breaks, in all their departures from the
decorums of literature, in their lowest descents from the refinements
of society. The vulgarity is not _the_ vulgarity of the vulgar--the
inelegancy is not the spontaneous rudeness of the ill-bred--any more
than its doctrine of nature is the doctrine of the unlearned. The
loftiest refinements of letters, the courtliest breeding, the most
exquisite conventionalities, the most regal dignities of nature, are
always present in _these_ works, to measure these abysses, flowering
to their brink. Man as he is, booked, surveyed,--surveyed from the
continent of nature, put down as he is in her book of kinds, not as he
is from his own interior isolated conceptions only,--the universal
powers and causes as they are developed in him, in his untaught
affections, in his utmost sensuous darkness,--the universal principle
instanced whereit is most buried, the cause in nature found;--man as
he is, in his heights and in his depths, 'from his lowest note to the
top of his key,'--man in his possibilities, in his actualities, in his
thought, in his speech, in his book language, and in his every-day
words, in his loftiest lyric tongue, in his lowest pit of play-house
degradation, searched out, explained, interpreted. That is the key to
the books of this Academe, who carry always on their armour, visible
to those who have learned their secret, but hid under the symbol of
their double worship, the device of the Hunters,--the symbol of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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