outward condition not a little improved. A few years pass, and the progress of society reaches the point attained by the philosopher, and settles down on the new discovery. From this point new philosophers start, and stray into new regions. Again the practical man wonders, and shakes his head. Again his eyes are opened. A new discovery, another invention, and society, like a horde of wandering gipsies, must take up its march anew, and move its kitchen-utensils to the next restingplace. Such has ever been the progress of discovery, from the time of Pythagoras to the time of Laplace. When will mankind learn to believe in science, and to respect the uses of thought? All knowledge is practical. Nay, more, all inquiry is practical, if our definition of practical, embraces, as it ought, the uses of the mind, which are the final, and therefore, the only real use in all our scheming and doing. Regarded in this light, the very abstractions and most refined subtleties of metaphysics, which the world esteems so lightly, have their use. Not only do they serve as a discipline, to minds that are fitted to converse with such speculations, but they act as feeders of literature, and, through the medium of poetry and prose disquisition, convey nourishment to such as are unable to receive them in their abstract form. I call practical, whatever ennobles the mind, by exalting and refining our conceptions of the universe we inhabit. And this, I believe to be the tendency of science, just in proportion as inquiry is pushed beyond the visible forms of things, to the innermost laws, and secret life of Nature. The further we

explore in this direction, the more clearly we discern the ever-present agency of Spirit, represented by its highest manifestation,-Law. The outward form the mere dead substance, grows less and less; action and life fill its place, till at last the whole of being appears to be but an aggregate of laws, and nature teems with spirit.*

A German philosopher ascribes to the identity of nature and spirit our tendency to introduce theory into the phenomena of nature.

"The perfection of natural science," says he, "would thus be the spiritualizing of all natural laws into laws of perception and thought. Hence, the more the laws of nature are revealed, the more the form and substance vanish, the phenomena become more and more ideal, and at last are merged in laws. The phenomena of optics are a pure geometry, whose lines are drawn through the light, and that light itself is of doubtful materiality. In magnetism, every trace of matter vanishes, and as to the phenomena of gravitation, which the natural philosopher can only conceive of as a spiritual influence, all that we see or know of them is their law, whose highest manifestation is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. A complete theory of nature would be that in which all nature resolves itself into intelligence."t

To most men, I am aware, speculations of this sort will seem the farthest possible removed from any practical use; and yet the effect they have in ennobling and exalting the mind, the influence they exert on our religious faith, and the new life they infuse into our views of nature and of God, may be regarded, it seems to me, as a use fairly coming within the true idea of the practical, though in the language of another, "they do not replenish our purse or otherwise aid our digestive faculty."

For that perversion of the practical, which regards only the lower and material uses of life, I know no better antidote than a zealous cultivation,

*So Sir Humphrey Davy is said to have exclaimed once, under the excitement of nitrous oxyd: "There exists nothing but thoughts, the universe is composed of ideas."

F. W. J. Schelling's Transcendentaler Idealismus.

among all classes of society, according to their several ability, of the beautiful. The love of the beautiful, as one of the fundamental principles of our spiritual nature, deserves a prominent place among the laws and influences which regulate our daily actions and pursuits. It may be regarded as a sort of secular religion, bearing the same relation to our worldly affairs, that the love of the good does to our moral duties. A sense of the beautiful, more or less developed, may be discovered in the sentiments, and practice of every human being. None are wholly destitute of this feeling. There is something divine in man, which ever prompts him to look beyond the mere supply of his necessities. In the poorest cabin, no board is spread without some regard to symmetry and order. No garment is cut without some reference to the rules of grace. There is an alliance too, between convenience and beauty, which looks like a design, on the part of the Creator, to call the attention of mankind to the latter principle. It is Goethe, I think, who says that the useful and the good grow in various ways from the beautiful. The mechanism of the heavenly motions can hardly be conceived as possible, had any less graceful curve than the ellipse been assigned to them. The human frame would lose much of its convenience, were its parts and proportions less symmetrically arranged. In human life, good taste and propriety are strictly co-ordinate, and the perfection of art is always the union of fitness and grace. See the union of these two principles in the combinations

of architecture. in which each part does not subserve some obvious use. An Ionic column is a graceful structure, and so is a Gothic arch, but either would be a deformity, if it stood by itself alone, without supporting a superincumbent weight. The window which admits the light, serves at the same time to relieve the uniformity of the building, and to prevent its becoming a lifeless block. In like manner the fireplace pays a double debt to comfort and decoration. In all work, what is called the finish, is, for the most part, equally the perfection of utility and of ornament. So likewise, in the moral world, the beautiful is always ancillary to the good, in so much that the terms are generally convertible, and every heroic deed affects us not less by the gratification it affords to our innate sense of harmony, than by the force with which it appeals to our perceptions of the eternal fitness of things. It is not, however, my purpose to defend the beautiful, which always justifies itself, but to recommend its cultivation, as a principle of equal dignity and importance with the practical, in the formation of the intellectual character, and a wholesome check on the excesses and perversions of the latter. Indeed, if we compare the influence of both on the mind, and observe how a lively sense of the beautiful, in nature and art, softens the character, how it calms the passions, and soothes affliction, and persuades content, and reconciles us to all that is bitter and hard in life; how it allies itself with all that is noble and good, and elevates the thoughts above the ignoble cares, the

No edifice strikes us as beautiful,

childish disappointments and all the littleness of earth, and directs them to eternal and unchangeable principles of harmony and order—we shall be constrained, I think, to give this sentiment a far higher place, than belongs to the practical, generally so called, in the scale of human wants and earthly aspirations. It was their love of the beautiful, more than any thing else, which raised the Greeks above all the states of antiquity, and gave them their permanent rank in the history of nations. Among us, as among them, I would have the love of beauty a prominent sentiment, and a leading influence. I would see it manifested in every forin of daily use, and in all the pursuits of life. As a means of cultivating this sentiment, poetry, and every branch of literature and art, deserve an equal place with the sciences in the education of the people, and merit equally the regard of your schools and Lyceums. And in this connection, I cannot but consider the decided taste evinced for the arts in this country, and the eminence attained in some of them, as a happy omen in the prospect of national culture. Already we have our sculptors, among the first in that department of art, and in Allston, a painter not surpassed by any since the Italian school. These are national honors of which we have reason to be proud. They are national blessings, if we consider them only in relation to our own times, yet less to be prized as an evidence of what has already been attained, than as pledges of future greatness.

Such, Gentlemen, are the prospects of American culture; such the influences which favor,