/z?L^ &£zz 
 
 LITERATURE, 
 ART, AND SCIENCE, 
 
 CONSIDERED AS MEANS 
 
 ELEVATING THE POPULAR MIND. 
 
 THE REV. DR. BIBEE. 
 
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 , Itt fltii #miw, 
 
 CONSIDERED AS MEANS 
 
 OF 
 
 ELEVATING THE POPULAR MIND: 
 
 AN INATJGUKAL LECTURE, 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE OPENING OF THE LECTURE COURSES, 
 
 AT THE 
 
 <Eo|ml panopticon, ^Leicester Square, 
 
 ON MONDAY, JUNE 19th, 1S54. 
 
 BY 
 
 THE EEV. G. E. BIBER, LL.D., Ph.D., 
 
 DIRECTOR OF THE LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC DEPARTMENT OF 
 THE INSTITUTION. 
 
 LONDON: 
 RIVINGTONS, WATERLOO PLACE. 
 
 1854. 
 
A WISH to see the following Lecture in print, has been 
 expressed in more than one quarter. To this wish the Author 
 felt that he was the more bound to defer, since it appears that 
 in many parts of the Building he was but imperfectly heard. 
 He may add that he is not sorry to have this opportunity of 
 recording, more publicly as well as permanently, the views he 
 entertains as to the mission w^hich Literature, Art, and Science 
 have in the present age, — views which have had no small 
 weight with him, in inducing him to connect himself with the 
 Royal Panopticon in an official capacity. 
 
 In Exchange 
 jmv. IjU»» 
 
LECTURE, 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen, 
 
 On the occasion of the opening of a series of Lecture Courses, — the 
 first of many which will, I trust, be delivered within these walls, — > 
 some explanation may, not unnaturally, be looked for, as to the 
 design which the promoters of this Institution have in view, and as 
 to the position which it is intended that it should occupy by the 
 side of other institutions devoted to the advancement of Literature, 
 Art, and Science. To give that explanation, is a duty which, in 
 consequence of my official connexion with the Institution, devolves 
 upon the humble individual who now addresses you; and this 
 circumstance I must ask you to accept as the only apology I have 
 to offer for presenting myself before you, notwithstanding the 
 painfully vivid conviction which I have that there are many, pro- 
 bably not a few among those now ^present, who would far more 
 worthily fill this place. But while I am deeply sensible of my 
 inability to do justice to the task imposed upon me, I am also well 
 aware that professions of a sense of inability, on the part of those 
 who step forward to address public assemblies, are apt to obtain 
 but little credit for sincerity, however unmistakable the subsequent 
 evidence of their truth may be; and I shall, therefore, without 
 further preface or apology, and in reliance on your kind indulgence, 
 at once address myself to the proper subject of my discourse — 
 a review, necessarily rapid, of the rise and progress of human 
 culture in its various branches, and a brief indication of the views 
 under the influence of which it is proposed to make the fruits of 
 a2 
 
that progress available in the Institution in which we are now 
 assembled. 
 
 In addressing myself to this extensive field of discussion, it is 
 not my intention to trespass upon your patience by a dry enumera- 
 tion of names and technical terms; I would rather ask you to 
 accompany me in the endeavour to follow in the track of man, 
 while engaged, in that pursuit of knowledge, and in those attempts 
 to bring his creative powers into play, to which he is, alike, invited 
 by the world around him, and irresistibly impelled by the instinct 
 of his own nature. In making use of the term man, I should 
 wish to be understood as having an eye both to the individual 
 and to the entire race ; for as much as the history of the aggregate 
 development of human kind is marked by similar stages, and ex- 
 hibits analogous phenomena, with the development of the individual. 
 
 At the first stage of that development, in what may be termed 
 his boyhood, we find man engaged in exploring the world around 
 him, in surveying its external aspect and tracing out its local 
 divisions, and in distinguishing and classifying the individual 
 objects which it presents to his view. In the very act of doing 
 this, we find him gaining full possession of his senses, not merely 
 as passive channels through which impressions from without reach 
 his mind, but as obedient instruments of that mind, employed in 
 such directions and for such purposes as the mind and its con- 
 trolling jDower, the will, may determine. And again, in the 
 course of this process, we find that he gradually becomes conscious 
 of an inward power of thought and of volition, and of a creative 
 instinct which prompts him not only to place the objects around 
 him in new combinations, other than those in which they natu- 
 rally appear, but to alter their form and fashion, so as to render 
 them conformable to his own taste and fancy, and subservient to 
 his own uses. The first steps made by man in the knowledge of 
 the surrounding world are attended by corresponding advances in 
 the knowledge of himself and of his own powers, and by conse- 
 quent attempts to create a world of his own — in and beside the 
 world which he finds ready created for him — out of the materials 
 which that world supplies. 
 
 On looking back upon the result of this first stage in the develop- 
 
5 
 
 ment of the human race, we find, — at no great distance from the 
 primitive seat of the human family, — in Western Asia and on the 
 banks of the Nile, powerful nations engaged in perpetual wars with 
 each other for territorial aggrandizement ; devoted at home to the 
 pursuits of agriculture and some kinds of industry ; but above all, as 
 the summit of their ambition, taking a pride in the erection of 
 gigantic structures, the ruins of which are to this day exciting our 
 wonder and admiration, — palaces, not of the living only, but of 
 the dead, — the habitations of the former being replete with all 
 the objects of luxury which could minister to the gratification of 
 the senses, and surrounded by gardens and parks, where the various 
 productions of nature, animal as well as vegetable, were collected 
 together to do homage to nature's master, man. The monuments 
 which remain to testify of the character of their civilization, bespeak 
 astonishing skill in cutting out, transporting, and piling up, huge 
 masses of stone, and carving them into various shapes, partly in 
 rude imitation of nature's forms, and partly in strange and fanciful 
 combination of those forms, — as in the Egyptian Sphinx, or the 
 Human-headed Bull of Nineveh. The walls of their palaces were 
 covered with representations of the inhabitants of different 
 countries, distinguished by their national features, their dress and 
 armour, and of the productions of those countries ; the sculptors 
 who chiselled them being the geographers, the ethnographers, the 
 natural historians, as well as, in their fanciful compositions, the 
 romancers of their day. Nor was their knowledge confined to the 
 earth ; there are plain indications that they had mapped out the 
 ethereal world above their heads, observed the motions of the 
 heavenly bodies, and learned to calculate the periodical changes of 
 their relative positions. Thus far, then, we have an exhibition of 
 intellectual and physical power, brought to bear upon the know- 
 ledge of external nature, the erection of mighty structures, and 
 the establishment of powerful empires; — the spirit in which all 
 this was achieved being summed up in the proud boast of the King 
 of nations on the banks of the Euphrates, " This is great Babylon, 
 which I have built." 
 
 But the human race was not, any more than the human indi- 
 vidual, destined to remain in a state of perpetual boyhood. From 
 
Western Asia and Egypt civilisation migrated to the Verdant 
 isles, the sunny bays, and lovely shores of the Mediterranean. 
 Here, under the fostering influence of a delicious climate, stimu- 
 lated by the infinite variety of forms presented by land and water, 
 man rose rapidly from boyhood into youth. No longer content 
 with a mere external knowledge of the world around him, he 
 began to search after the laws by which it is governed, detaching 
 those laws in his mind from the objects in which they are exhibited 
 in nature. Hence the science of mathematics, the focus, so to speak, 
 of Grecian philosophy, from which mental speculation, independent 
 of the outer world, darted forth its rays in various directions, and 
 thus gave rise to diverging lines of pure mental science. Hence, 
 again, the first rudiments of physical science, the inquiries into the 
 origin of divers kinds of beings, into the phenomena incident to 
 their development, into the functions of their life, — the cosmogonies 
 of the Greek philosophers, their natural histories, and physio- 
 logical speculations. But what was most characteristic of this 
 period of the development of our race, was the awakening of the 
 imaginative faculty, the dominant faculty of the season of youth. 
 Ideal conceptions embodied by the limner's or the sculptor's skilful 
 hand in creations of exquisite beauty, • — restorations of original per- 
 fection, rather than imitations of extant forms, — attested the 
 existence in the human mind of a creative power akin to that 
 which set the stamp of beauty and harmony upon universal nature. 
 Under the influence of that power and sense of the Beautiful, the 
 architectural structures raised by the hand of man assumed an 
 essentially different character. It was no longer at colossal 
 dimensions, but at harmonious proportions, that the creative 
 instinct aimed. The monuments of ancient Greece, the relics of 
 her halls, her porticoes, her temples, bespeak a widely different 
 state of mind and feeling on the part of those who planned and 
 erected them, than the pyramids, the obelisks, and other monu- 
 ments of Egypt, and the relics of Assyrian, Babylonian, and 
 Medo-Persian architecture, exhibited in the ruins of Persepolis, 
 or extricated from the moimds of the plain of Mosul. 
 
 But art, the development of the Eesthetic faculty of the human 
 mind, did not confine itself to the expression of its lofty concep- 
 
tions in external forms, in painting, sculpture, and architecture : it 
 took a yet higher flight. Detaching itself from material objects, 
 the instinct of the Beautiful implanted in man's nature found a 
 vent for itself in the modulation of the fleeting sounds -which rise 
 and die away on the air, as short-lived as the breath by which that 
 same air sustains the functions of life. The quality, the duration 
 of those sounds, became the subject of measurement, of calcula- 
 tion, of artistic adjustment, in accordance with the laws of har- 
 mony and rhythm. The ruder attempts, belonging to an 
 earlier stage of human development, to produce sounds of a 
 pleasing and inspiriting charactei*, such as enhanced the luxuri- 
 ous revels in the palaces of the kings of Nineveh and Babylon, 
 and the wild frenzy of their idol worship, — the boisterous 
 music of savage or demi-savage life, — gave place to the more 
 refined combinations of carefully modulated tones. The art of 
 song arose, and, united to that wonderful endowment of man's 
 nature, the gift of speech, gave birth to Divine poesy, — to the 
 heroic strains which chronicled the martial deeds and strange 
 adventures of the conquerors of Troy, the victory of European 
 energy and skill over Asiatic luxury and power, — to the lyric 
 effusions in which the ardent passions of the youthful life of the 
 Hellenic tribes found a graceful vent, — and to those bursts of 
 dramatic eloquence, controlled and subdued by the oracular voice 
 of the chorus, which embodied to the ears of transfixed Athenian 
 audiences the fabulous traditions of the world's early history, 
 mingled with dim perceptions of the high hand of Divine power 
 and justice overruling the affairs of this lower world. 
 
 And now, having, under the serene and brilliant sky of Greece, 
 outlived the enchanted period of youth, man entered upon the 
 riper age of manhood, with its sterner purposes and severer 
 occupations. To reduce human life to rule and order, — to bring it 
 into subjection to unbending laws, to a spirit of domination 
 which, for the maintenance of a principle and a purpose, suppressed 
 the weaker sympathies, trampled upon the softer instincts of his 
 nature, — was the task which man proposed to himself in the seven- 
 hilled city on the banks of the Tiber. Personified, within the 
 narrow circle of the family, by the lord of the household, that 
 
imperious spirit wielded the power of life and death over wife, 
 children, and slaves; it stalked forth through the streets of the 
 city, embodied in the axe and fasces, borne by the lictor before the 
 inexorable magistrate, who to-morrow became himself subject to 
 the dominion which to-day he exercised ; and it carried the terror 
 of its invincible legions over the whole extent of the known world, 
 and to its utmost boundaries, where the tide of savage life broke 
 in fierce conflict against the shores of civilisation. War, which 
 had hitherto been the encounter of masses of brute force, under 
 the impulse of hostile passions, became now a matter of science, 
 of deliberate calculation; and the organization of human society, 
 subdued in the first instance by the power of the sword, was regu- 
 lated by the no less rigorous science of law, brought to per- 
 fection in that stupendous monument of the accumulated intellect 
 of ages, the Code of Justinian. 
 
 It was not, however", territorial empire alone that the spirit of 
 domination and conquest achieved, by which the rise and progress 
 of the Roman republic, inevitably transformed in the course of 
 time into the imperial city, was characterised. All the results of 
 human culture which had been obtained by different nations, 
 through the preceding stages of man's development, were absorbed 
 into the life of his full-ripe manhood, as exhibited in the Roman 
 world. The idea of universal dominion was exemplified by Rome 
 in a fashion and to an extent which cast the ancient empires 
 raised in the East at an earlier period of the world's history > 
 utterly into the shade. Not only were all the countries of the 
 then known world successively converted into provinces of the 
 Roman Empire, but Rome concentrated within herself, and 
 appropriated to herself, whatever up to that time had anywhere 
 been discovered or invented, ascertained or imagined, wrought or 
 realised by man. As the worship of the gods of all the nations of 
 the earth found a place in her Pantheon, so the harvest of all the 
 seeds of human civilization which had been sown for ages, was 
 gathered into the lap of the avaricious and luxurious, the rapacious 
 and prodigal metropolis and mistress of the world. There was as 
 much truth as fiction in the legend which denied to the Roman 
 people a distinctive national origin ; — it was the life of the whole 
 
race of man that was summed and headed up in the life of 
 Imperial Rome. 
 
 One formidable rival, and one only, had Rome to encounter in 
 her progress towards this universal dominion. A nation, small 
 in its beginnings, originally confined to a narrow strip of land on 
 the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, but spread out widely? 
 through the lapse of centuries, over its islands, and along both its 
 northern and its southern shores, and thence, beyond the columns 
 of Hercules, probably across the Atlantic ocean, for a time dis- 
 puted the pretensions, and seriously menaced the very existence, of 
 the giant-power that was rising up in the centre of the Italian 
 peninsula. That nation was distinguished from all the other 
 nations of the earth by the peculiar character of its civilization. 
 It formed no link in the chain of human development, it con- 
 tributed nothing to the intellectual, the sesthetic, the moral and 
 social progress of the human race. All its energies were devoted 
 to the perishable uses of life. Its industry turned all the pro- 
 ductions of the earth to profitable account ; its vessels explored 
 every sea; its commerce connected the mysterious East with the 
 fabulous West by the interchange of substantial merchandize. It 
 was in self-defence against the encroachments of Roman conquest 
 that this nation first entered upon the fierce struggle, uncongenial 
 to its character and its pursuits, which, protracted through more 
 than a century, ended, after a succession of bloody wars, in the 
 extinction of the great naval and commercial power of the ancient 
 world. Carthage, once the mistress of the seas, whose adventurous 
 sailors visited the islands in the tempestuous waters of the North for 
 the sake of their metallic treasures, and circumnavigated the 
 southern capes of the African continent in search of gold, — whose 
 merchants and manufacturers were the purveyors of the world, — 
 reduced to ashes by the ruthless hand of the Roman conqueror, 
 left no trace behind in the science, the art, the literature of 
 humankind, — a beacon of warning against the marring effect 
 produced by base utilitarian tendencies upon the minds of nations 
 no less than upon the minds of individuals. 
 
 But to return from this digression, which seemed inevitable in 
 order not to leave the picture of the life of man in the first great 
 
10 
 
 era of his existence incomplete. In the Roman world the human 
 race had attained the full ripeness of that development of which 
 it was capable by the unfolding of its own inherent powers, with- 
 out extraneous aid. Unmistakable symptoms of senility and 
 decay were rapidly setting in, when, with Christianity, a new 
 element of life, secretly nurtured in an obscure nook of the world, 
 was introduced, which, combining with the fresh blood infused 
 from the hitherto unexplored storehouses of human life in central 
 Asia, laid the foundation of another era of man's existence, and 
 gave rise to a new development of his nature in another and a 
 nobler form. Once more, if we watch the progress of this 
 development, shall we find the various stages through which 
 man had already passed, repeated under a different and alto- 
 gether novel aspect. The period which constitutes the boyhood 
 of man renovated by the heaven-born principle of Christianity, 
 was spent in the settlement of new states, under circumstances 
 of mutual conflict, bearing a striking resemblance to the con- 
 tention for preeminence and power, which had taken place 
 between the earliest empires of the ancient world. In other respects, 
 too, the analogy holds good. Man, represented, in his second 
 boyhood, by the Christianized barbarians which had overrun the 
 Homan empire, was wholly engrossed by the effort to make him- 
 self master of the civilization of the old world, in the midst of 
 which he had settled down, even as in his first boyhood man had 
 made himself master of the world of nature. By degrees the 
 conquerors appropriated the fruits of the antecedent development 
 of the human race, and adapted themselves to the form of life 
 which that development had produced. In doing so, they, too, 
 became conscious of powers which had hitherto lain dormant within 
 them, and to the unfolding of which a powerful impulse was 
 given by the new scene upon which they had entered. Society was 
 resettled upon the basis of the institutions which had grown up 
 under the sway of Rome, modified by the benign spirit of the 
 Christian faith. The energies of man, when not engaged in martial 
 conflict between kingdoms contending for supremacy, or for dis- 
 puted cities and provinces, were employed in the erection of stately 
 temples, characterized by rude grandeur, rather than by artistic 
 
11 
 
 beauty, — at once the monuments of the piety of the living, and the 
 repositories of the honoured dead, — and of vast monastic edifices, — 
 needful places of refuge in those turbulent times, not for religion 
 alone, but for whatever of knowledge and of the peaceful arts of 
 life had been preserved from the wreck of the ancient world. 
 
 The transition from this state of second boyhood to the state of 
 second youth was accelerated by the stimulating influence — 
 suddenly brought to bear upon the newly settled nations of 
 Europe — of a power wholly foreign in its origin to the previous 
 civilization of mankind. On the arid soil of Arabia, among the 
 children of the desert, a new religion, antagonistic to that which 
 the whole civilized world had adopted, sprang up, and in the 
 course of its rapid and precocious upgrowth gave birth not only to a 
 political and military system of the most formidable character, 
 but at the same time to an unusually rich efflorescence of the 
 human mind. While the sword of the Saracens struck terror 
 into the hearts of the empires newly founded on the ruins of the 
 Roman, their science, their art and literature, developed with 
 singular intensity of life, exercised a powerful influence upon the 
 mind of Europe. The study of astronomy, geography, and phy- 
 sical science, was revived through the impulse given by the explo- 
 rations and investigations of the indefatigable Arab mind, by 
 whose ingenious discoveries the science of numbers, the art of 
 calculation, was remodelled and advanced; the poetry of the 
 Moors, ardent as the climate under which it had sprung up, inocu- 
 lated the southern nations of Europe with which they mingled, 
 with the passionate love of song ; and Moorish architecture not 
 only impressed some of its most important features upon the archi- 
 tecture of the Christian world, but developed a type peculiarly 
 its own, — a type which, while it boldly imitated the glorious vault 
 of heaven, rivalled in richness of decoration the wild luxuriance 
 of the vegetation of the south, and of which, in this very building, 
 you behold a nobly executed specimen, not inappropriately dedi- 
 cated to those pursuits of literature, art, and science, which, at a 
 former period of the world's history, were so deeply indebted to 
 the Saracenic mind. It is true that the rich bloom of the deve- 
 lopment which that mind attained was but evanescent ; for the 
 
12 
 
 tree on which it grew had no root in the deep and fruitful soil of 
 truth : yet, if we compare the lasting effects which the transient 
 gleam of Moorish civilization has left behind, with the total dis- 
 appearance of every trace of the civilization of the Phoenician 
 tribes, — which, by a curious coincidence, had spread in the same 
 direction, and overrun in a great measure the very same territo- 
 ries subsequently occupied by the Saracens, — we are involuntarily 
 led to reflect upon the striking contrast, as regards the effect pro- 
 duced upon the unfolding and ennobling of the human mind, 
 between a national life given up to a mercenary spirit, exclusively 
 devoted to industrial and commercial pursuits, to the supply of 
 man's material wants, and a national life founded on a, principle, 
 however erroneous that principle may be. Wherever there is a 
 principle, a quickening power is at work, the results of which are 
 never wholly lost, — whilst, in the absence of a principle, the mind, 
 falling into bondage to the lower purposes of life, bears no fruit 
 except of the most ephemeral and perishable kind. 
 
 Such a principle, a quickening power, shortlived in itself, but of 
 permanent influence upon the course of human civilization, in- 
 spired the Moorish race during the brilliant period of its intrusion, 
 comet-like, into the regular orbits of European life, revolving 
 around the central sun of Christianity. The impulse which it gave 
 to the cultivation of the arts and sciences was as salutary as it was 
 powerful. The silent cloister became instinct with mental energy, 
 while its seclusion favoured the patient pursuit of tedious investi- 
 gation, and the steady operations of laborious thought. Within its 
 precincts, and under its patronage, Christian art arose — an archi- 
 tecture which, in endless variety of ornament, still pointed heaven- 
 ward, in token of the purpose to which its creations were conse- 
 crated ; painting and sculpture adapted themselves to the new 
 ideas which they were called upon to embody; music raised its 
 hallowed chants beneath the lofty arches of the sanctuary, and 
 thence passing forth into the world, displayed its charms, and 
 exercised its softening and ennobling influence, in lays of love and 
 chivalry. By the side of the dry chronicle sprang up the imagina- 
 tive legend and the romantic tale. Once more — as, in days of yore, 
 in happy Greece — man indulged in the day-dreams of youth, and 
 
13 
 
 invested with the grace and charm of poetry every feature of life, 
 not excepting the rude encounters and terrible catastrophes of 
 •war. The revival of the tendencies of the classic age led to the 
 study of classical antiquity, both in art and letters, and thereby to 
 the formation of a higher and purer taste. While tournaments 
 replaced the games of ancient Greece, a Raphael rivalled and ex- 
 celled its Apelles, a Michael Angelo its Phidias; the lyre of 
 Petrarch eclipsed that of Anacreon; an Ariosto and a Tasso em- 
 bodied the exploits of the paladins and crusaders in epic song not 
 unworthy to trace up its descent to the bard who immortalised 
 the wrath of Pelides ; and the "Divine Comedy" of Dante repro- 
 duced, though in a different form, the deep pathos and the stern 
 severity of Grecian tragedy. 
 
 But, like the first, the second youth of the human race passed 
 away in its turn; — man entered on his second manhood. The 
 golden tints of poetry which had illumined life during the medi- 
 seval period, gradually faded away, and a sombrer hue once more 
 overcast the horizon of the civilised world. The reign of beauty 
 made way for the ascendancy of principle, and the imperious dic- 
 tates of law began to prevail where fancy had disported herself in 
 playful gambols. The same tendency to organise human society on 
 the basis of inflexible rules, which had so strikingly developed itself 
 in the Roman commonwealth of the ancient world, reappeared, and 
 asserted itself in two diverging, or rather antagonistic, lines. The 
 genius of ancient Pome had survived the ruin of her empire; it 
 reappeared in modern Rome with increased energy and sternness, 
 — with this only difference, that, instead of the sword of military 
 power, the sword of spiritual domination was now sent forth for 
 the conquest of the world. In rivalry with the ecclesiastical 
 supremacy which Christian Rome sought to establish, and in irre- 
 concileable opposition to it, another spirit, which had its root in 
 the character of the Teutonic races — the spirit of freedom — arose, 
 and in the course of a protracted and severe struggle, which in the 
 greater part of Europe is still in progress, fought for that inesti- 
 mable treasure, the only true safeguard of social order, of truth 
 and right, — constitutional liberty, — liberty circumscribed by just 
 and well-defined limits, but, within those limits, freedom of thought 
 and freedom of action. 
 
H 
 
 And as, at a former period of human development, the imperial 
 city, the metropolis and mistress of the world, had absorbed into 
 herself the results of all the culture that had gone before, setting 
 upon it the stamp of manly ripeness of mind, so we find at this 
 period, in the two diverging branches of European civilization, the 
 Honian and the Teutonic, but especially in the latter, every science 
 and every art, every department of human knowledge, and every 
 achievement of man's creative powers, reproduced in the full vigour 
 and maturity of manhood. 
 
 It is to this period of the history of man's progress that those dis- 
 coveries belong by which he has become acquainted with the entire- 
 circumference and surface of the globe which he inhabits. From 
 the first voyages of exploration round the Cape of Good Hope, and 
 across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to the adventurous search 
 in the Arctic regions which holds the present generation in anxious 
 suspense, what strides has he made in geographic knowledge! Nor 
 has he been content to penetrate into every habitable and every 
 inhabitable region of the earth; he has, by constant observation 
 and comparison, and by the aid of sister-sciences, succeeded in 
 tracing out many of the laws by which the relations and the mutual 
 action of earth, water, and air are determined. The tides and cur- 
 rents of the sea and of the atmosphere, the variations of climate, and 
 the consequent adaptation of different portions of the globe to the 
 life which they sustain, have all been made the subject of investi- 
 gation. Descending below the earth's surface, man has ascertained 
 the position of the different strata which constitute the outer crust 
 of his planet, and the nature and formation of the rocks of which 
 that crust is composed. The various creatures which inhabit the 
 land, and air, and water, have not only been sought out and classi- 
 fied, but their habits, their modes of life, have been closely watched; 
 their various structures have been examined by the anatomist; 
 the inner economy of the nature of each individual, and the rela- 
 tions which they all bear to one another in the economy of universal 
 nature, have been ascertained by the physiologist; while the chemist 
 has analysed the substances of which they are composed, and traced 
 out the changes which those substances undergo in the various 
 processes of life. From man's own physical frame down to the 
 meanest pebble, the tiniest grain of sand, there is nothing of which 
 
15 
 
 science is not able to render good account. Yea, and beyond this, 
 close and extensive observation of the analogies which run through 
 nature's works, has enabled man, from a few fragments of their frame, 
 to reconstruct races of creatures which formerly existed on the earth, 
 and have long since passed away. 
 
 Not only, however, has man obtained a more complete survey of 
 the world which from the first moment of his existence obtrudes 
 itself upon his senses and provokes the powers of his intellect to 
 observation and investigation; not only has he gained a fuller 
 insight into its nature : the increased powers of observation with 
 which optical science has armed him, multiplying, as it were, the 
 strength and capacity of his senses in proportion as his mind is 
 becoming capable of more expanded and more comprehensive 
 knowledge, have enabled him to discover myriads of beings, the 
 existence of which was not so much as suspected in former ages. 
 And as the microscope has laid bare to his wondering eye a 
 swarming life which, invisible from its minuteness, crowds the air 
 and disports itself in the smallest drop of water, the same science 
 of optics has furnished him, in the telescope, with the means of 
 exploring the unfathomable depths of the ethereal expanse in which 
 this globe of earth is floating, subject to the same laws of motion 
 which regulate the revolutions of the countless luminaries in the 
 firmament of heaven. These laws he has ascertained with a degree 
 of accuracy which enables him not only to calculate their progress 
 through infinite space, but to measure their dimensions, to weigh 
 their substance in the balances of his mind, and to draw conclu- 
 sions respecting their nature, and the nature of their probable 
 inhabitants, which would appear hazardous and baseless, were it 
 not that every step in the process which leads to those conclusions 
 is capable of being verified by the test of science. While thus the 
 curtain is withdrawn from that interminable vista into the universe 
 of creation, which he, whom I am proud to be able within these 
 walls to call our own Sir David Brewster, has thrown open in his 
 admirable essay, just published, "on the plurality of worlds," phy- 
 sical sicence has watched with astonishing success, full of the 
 promise of still further and greater discoveries, the phenomena 
 exhibited by those imponderable substances, light and heat, which 
 
1G 
 
 permeate all creation, and by the yet more mysterious forces of 
 electricity, galvanism, and magnetism, -whose agency, universally 
 diffused, seems to hover, so to speak, on the confines of organic 
 and inorganic existence. 
 
 If we inquire by what process all these wonderful discoveries of 
 inductive science have been arrived at, we find that they are the 
 result of the application to man's knowledge of the external world, 
 of those inalterable laws of mathematical truth which are im- 
 pressed alike upon the universe of creation whose existence and 
 action they regulate, and upon the mind of man to whom they 
 furnish a key to the inner secrets of that universe. Those laws, 
 first apprehended and in their elementary form distinctly enun- 
 ciated by the philosophers of ancient Greece, have, in this last 
 age of man, the age of his second manhood, received a develop- 
 ment which has carried the finite to the very boundaries of the 
 infinite. They have been brought to bear, both upon the eye and 
 ear of man, in optics and acoustics, multiplying his opportunities 
 of perception, and rendering that perception more accurate and 
 more searching. And, as they have added acuteness to his senses, 
 they have multiplied the power of his hand likewise to an almost 
 incredible extent, by means of mechanical science and its appli- 
 cation to the various uses of life. The forces of nature have been 
 pressed into man's service with a boldness of conception and power 
 of execution truly wonderful. Steam is made to perform the 
 labour of thousands of hands, and the electric telegraph is employed 
 to transmit along immense distances the thoughts of man with the 
 quickness of lightning, approaching the quickness of thought 
 itself. Manufacture, aided by all the discoveries of physical and 
 mechanical science, is converting the productions of nature to 
 man's use in a multitude and diversity of fabrics such as the world 
 has not witnessed before ; and, stimulated by this spirit of manu- 
 facture, as well as facilitated by surprising discoveries and 
 ingenious contrivances in the art of navigation, and generally in 
 the means of locomotion and conveyance, commerce has established 
 between the different nations of the earth a constancy of inter- 
 course which, independently of its immediate object, that of 
 exchanging material productions, exercises a most beneficial in- 
 
17 
 
 fl.uen.ee, by diffusing among all the families of mankind the 
 fruits of human culture, the lessons and the refinements of 
 civilisation, and, beyond and above them, the blessings of 
 Christianity. 
 
 Nor, amidst the studious pursuits of science and the busy oc- 
 cupations of industry and commerce which characterize the second 
 manhood of the human race, have the arts which soften and 
 embellish life been neglected. The deeper knowledge of the works 
 of nature to which science gives them easy access, has enabled the 
 sculptor and the painter not only to approach nearer to the truth 
 of nature in their imitation of her works, but has led them to dis- 
 cover, and by the aid of the chisel and the pencil to embody, tbose 
 ideal types of beauty and harmony of which the works of nature 
 are, in their endless variety, the manifold expression. Above all' 
 the discoveries which, in his progress to manhood's full maturity, 
 man has made in himself, the deeper consciousness which he has 
 acquired of his own inner nature, with all its powers and impulses, 
 have given to art its highest significance as a revelation of an inner 
 life, displaying in the rigid marble and on the frail canvas the 
 softest emotions as well as the fiercest passions of which man's 
 heart is susceptible, the noblest aspirations and the highest resolves 
 of his immortal mind, and reproducing, in the representation of 
 man by man's own hand, the stamp of divinity set upon him by 
 the hand of the Creator. 
 
 Not less marked is the progress towards perfection which music 
 has made in this last age of man's development, by its closer 
 alliance with science on the one hand, and on the other hand by 
 the embodiment of the loftiest thoughts and the noblest sentiments 
 of which human nature, under the spiritualizing influence of 
 Christianity, is capable. In the compositions of the great masters 
 of sacred music who arose during the middle and towards the close 
 of the last century, the art has achieved triumphs which can 
 never be surpassed ; and while the cultivation of the human voice 
 has attained a degree of excellence unknown to former ages, the 
 most gigantic strides have been made in the construction of musical 
 instruments, and especially of the organ, — of which one of the 
 noblest examples extant in the world adorns this very hall, pouring 
 
 B 
 
18 
 
 forth, from its four thousand fountains of sound, volumes of har- 
 mony which vibrate to the soul's innermost depth. 
 
 Nor did the high tone which art has attained in all its other 
 branches, fail to reach that noblest art to which the speech of man 
 imparts a dignity which no other art can reach — the art of poesy. 
 Neither the barcls of classic antiquity, nor the minstrels and poets 
 of the age of chivalry, can compare in transcendent conception, 
 in fervid imagination, in profound philosophy, or in burning 
 eloquence, with the inimitable portraitures in which, — to mention 
 no others, — Shakspere reproduces human life in all its varied 
 aspects, or with the bold flights of fancy in which Milton soars to 
 the unexplored regions of the unseen world. 
 
 Such a vast expansion of all the fields of human knowledge, 
 and such a manifold and intense development of all the powers of 
 man's nature, could not take place without his attention being 
 directed to those powers themselves, and especially to those which, 
 making use of the bodily organs as channels of external com- 
 munication, and instruments of external action, appertain to 
 another order of existence, having. their seat in that mysterious 
 immaterial essence which the eye cannot see, nor the hand handle, — 
 of which the ear alone can take cognizance in the outer world of 
 sense. Hence, while physical science has explored the universe of 
 creation, metaphysical science has prosecuted its researches deeper 
 and deeper into man's inner nature. The laws which regulate the 
 exercise of the power of thought; the laws which determine the 
 current of the affections, the feelings and passions ever fluctuating 
 within the human breast ; the laws which rule, or ought to rule, 
 the exertion of the power of volition, the governing power of the 
 inner man; the laws on which the dread tribunal of conscience 
 founds its sometimes questionable and uncertain, sometimes unim- 
 peachable decisions; and the influences by which the regular action 
 of those laws is disturbed, whether springing from the bodily 
 tenement in which the immaterial mind resides, or taking their 
 origin in the mind itself, and in the spirit- world with which, 
 through his mind, man is connected, as he is with the material 
 world through his body, — all these are themes suggested by his 
 consciousness of his inner self, on which man in the latest, and, as 
 
19 
 
 far as we can see, the last stage of his development, is no longer 
 free, as he was in its earlier periods, merely to muse and speculate 
 at his leisure, but with which, by an imperious necessity of his 
 inner being, he is forced to deal. Rendered certain, under the 
 influence of Christianity, of the existence of his soul, — which to 
 the philosophers of the ancient world was a problem rather than a 
 truth, — and grown to the ripe age of manhood, which enforces 
 grave reflection, man has been, and is, compelled to turn his mental 
 vision inwards upon himself; to watch the phenomena, to analyse 
 the elements, and to trace out the laws of the microcosm, the minia- 
 ture world that is lodged within him, no less than those of the 
 macrocosm, the universal world in which his own existence is 
 comprehended. 
 
 In reviewing, as we have done, — how imperfectly no one can be 
 more painfully conscious than myself, — the whole of this progress of 
 the human race from the childhood of simply human, to the man- 
 hood of Christianized, that is, of divinely renovated humanity, and 
 contemplating the accumulated results of the observations, the 
 i-esearches, the attempts, the efforts, and achievements of hundreds 
 and thousands of individuals, through successive generations of man- 
 kind as a whole, as one mighty aggregate result, there is one con- 
 sideration which forcibly suggests itself to the wondering, the 
 inquiring mind. " What is that link," so runs the question, " which 
 connects the inner life of one mind with the inner life of another 
 mind, which ties on the mental life of one to the mental life of 
 another generation of mankind ; which makes the discoveries, the 
 achievements of one mind, the common property of all, and puts the 
 latest generation in possession of the fruits produced by the 
 mental life of all the generations that have preceded it up to the 
 remotest ages of the world ?" The individual man observes, in- 
 vestigates, thinks, labours, creates, during a brief span of time, 
 within the limits of a few short years, and then he passes away, — 
 he is no more seen, his place knows him no more. Yet the fruit 
 of his mind's labour and toil, if there is in it aught that is worth 
 preserving, remains behind. The husk is carried ofi" no one knows 
 whither by the blast of death, but the kernel that grew within it 
 is winnowed out and treasured up in the ever increasing store of 
 
20 
 
 human culture, for the benefit of generations yet unborn. Whence 
 is this indefeasible right of succession which after-ages have to the 
 harvest of the mental life of all that ever went before 1 whence the 
 power of transmission which enabled the generations from the 
 beginning to hand down that harvest in ever multiplying abund- 
 ance to the latest posterity 1 
 
 That link of universal connexion between individual minds, and 
 between all the generations of mankind, is one of the most striking 
 characteristics by which man is distinguished from all the other 
 creatures on the face of the earth, the noblest and most wonderful 
 of the Creator's gifts to man — the gift of speech. In the throat of 
 man, beneath that part of his physical frame which is the seat of 
 thought, and connected with the organs which, by the perpetual 
 process of inhalation and exhalation, supply the whole organism with 
 the fuel of life contained in the circumambient air, there is a small 
 organ of exceedingly complicated and delicate structure, the 
 various modifications of which, aided by the upper organs of the 
 cavity of the mouth, terminating in the lips, produce, by the vibra- 
 tions imparted to the air in the act of exhalation, a variety of 
 vocal sounds and consonant articulations, capable of numberless 
 combinations. Answerable to this wonderful organ by which 
 speech is produced, there is, affixed on either side to the same 
 organ already referred to as the seat of thought, a pair of other 
 organs, of structure wholly different, but equally complicated and 
 delicate, which, acting simultaneously and harmoniously with one 
 another, catch up the vibrations so produced in the air, in all the 
 niceness of distinction which the utterance of speech imparts to 
 them, for the purpose of conveying them to the seat of thought. 
 Of the rapidity with which this process is carried on you may form 
 some conception, when I state that since I have commenced 
 addressing you my organs of speech have successively assumed 
 between thirty and forty thousand different positions, giving birth 
 to as many different and distinct modifications in the vibrations of 
 the air, which constitute sound and articulation, — and that these 
 thirty to forty thousand vibrations have been caught up and regis- 
 tered by your organs of hearing. Of the manner in which this 
 has been achieved, neither speaker nor hearers were conscious, up 
 
21 
 
 to the moment when our attention has been directed to the point ; 
 and even now we have neither of us any control over the details of 
 the complicated action of nerves and muscles by which the acts of 
 speaking and hearing are accomplished. Both the organ of speech 
 and the organ of hearing are in the keeping of a higher and more 
 skilful hand than our own, which sustains them and regulates 
 their action. They are lent to us for the very purpose before 
 alluded to, interchange between the life of one mind and the life 
 of another mind. By means of those vibrations, produced by me, 
 caught up by you, we know not how, the counterpart of the 
 thoughts which were in my mind, has been called up in your 
 minds ; whether valuable or worthless in themselves, they are no 
 longer my exclusive property, — they have passed into your pos- 
 session. 
 
 But this is not all. With instructive consciousness of the value 
 of this gift of speech, man has from the earliest period of his deve- 
 lopment laboured to give permanency to that utterance which, as 
 it issues from the lips and enters the ear, is but a fleeting sound 
 that dies away on the air on which it floats with such amazing- 
 lightness and swiftness. From the rude hieroglyphic which con- 
 founded the sight of the eye with the hearing of the ear, to the 
 symbols of the shorthand writer substituted for alphabetic writing, 
 in order to enable the hand to keep pace with the rapidity of the 
 voice, a variety of systems have been devised, all having for their 
 object to fix the sounds of human speech, and with them the 
 thoughts which those sounds convey. And different tribes and 
 families of mankind, making use of entirely different sets of sounds, — 
 though all combinations of essentially the same modifications in 
 the action of the vocal organs, and the same consequent vibrations of 
 the air, — have learned to compare their several systems of speech, 
 and to ascertain the equivalent combinations of sound employed by 
 them respectively for the expression of one and the self-same 
 thought. 
 
 To trace out the history of human speech, the history of written 
 language, the connexion between the multifarious idioms, and their 
 common dependence on one universal law of speech, what a theme 
 of abounding richness and interest! — a theme which, had I not 
 
22 
 
 already trespassed too long upon your attention, might well 
 tempt me to enter, — on another path, for the sake of surveying it in 
 another aspect, — upon another review of the development of man. 
 But time warns me to draw to a conclusion, and I must pass on. 
 
 Suffice it, then, to observe, that the gift to man of this wonder- 
 ful power of transmitting thought from mind to mind, — multiplied, 
 no less than the power of the eye has been multiplied by the 
 microscope and the telescope, by the art of writing, and still more, 
 on man's entrance upon his second manhood, by the art of print- 
 ing, — is clearly indicative of a design on the part of the Creator 
 that the fruits of man's mental life, of the culture of all his per- . 
 ceptive and creative faculties, — the aggregate resiilt of the develop- 
 ment of the entire race, — should be made the common property, as 
 it is the common produce, of man. All that science has discovered, 
 and art has achieved, the history and literature of the human race, 
 is a treasure to be dispensed, — and that without being diminished, — 
 to all mankind. That of this universal treasure, the common pro- 
 perty of the human race, each human individual is entitled to receive 
 and to enjoy a share, is a truth which is happily now recognised 
 beyond the possibility of contradiction. Too long has that truth 
 been ignored ; too long has knowledge, the pursiiit of science, of art 
 and literature, been considered the exclusive property and occupation 
 of the few. To the masses of mankind the history of man has re- 
 mained a sealed book, the treasures of human culture accumulated 
 through the lapse of ages have been to them as if they were not. 
 Like every other contravention of the benevolent designs of the 
 Creator, this, too, has entailed baneful consequences. Ignorance, a 
 torpid condition of the mental powers, induced by want of exer- 
 cise, has brought in its train the indulgence of vicious propensi- 
 ties, the pursuit of frivolous amusements, — pernicious palliatives 
 against that sense of weariness which the drudgery of daily toil in 
 the necessary avocations of life entails, unless relieved by some 
 species of recreation. 
 
 To provide that recreation of which by the divinely appointed 
 order of his being man stands in need, in that form which is 
 worthiest of man, — by affording to the vast masses of human 
 beings which are dwelling in, and daily crowding into, this vast and 
 
busy metropolis, an opportunity of surveying the accumulated 
 results of human culture, in the various departments of science, 
 art, and literature, — and thus to aid in dispensing those treasured 
 fruits of the mental life of universal mankind which are the 
 common property of all, is one of the leading objects for which 
 this Institution has been called into being, and the main object of 
 that department of it which is this day brought into full operation. 
 
 To take a part in this work and function, — to lend a helping- 
 hand in leading men through the outer court of the temple of 
 knowledge, in which the wonders of creation, searched out by 
 man, and the results of man's own creative powers, are displayed, 
 to the door of that inner sanctuary where the voice of God Himself 
 is heard, — is, to my thinking, the high privilege as well as the 
 solemn and responsible duty of all who have it in their power to 
 contribute towards the attainment of so desirable an end. 
 
 Confidently, therefore, while thanking you for the kind indul- 
 gence with which you have accorded me your attention, I appeal 
 to those who are competent to be instructors of their fellow-men, 
 for their hearty co-operation; and I venture to look forward to the 
 day when the influence of this Institution shall make itself ex- 
 tensively felt among all classes in this metropolis, and beyond its 
 precincts, by the encouragement which it shall give to the employ- 
 ment of the faculties of the human mind in pursuits calculated to 
 elevate, to refine, and to ennoble it, — and so to bring about the 
 fulfilment of those prophetic words of the poet-sage : 
 
 " Science then 
 
 Shall be a precious Visitant ; and then, 
 
 And only then, be worthy of her name. 
 
 For then her Heart shall kindle; her dull Eye, 
 
 Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang 
 
 Chained to its object in brute slavery; 
 
 But, taught with patient interest to watch 
 
 The processes of things, and serve the cause 
 
 Of order and distinctness, not for this 
 
 Shall it forget that its most noble use, 
 
 Its most illustrious province, must be found 
 
 In furnishing clear guidance, a support 
 
 Not treacherous, to the Mind's excursive Power. 
 
MAR 11 1907 
 
 24 
 
 — So build we up the Being that we are ; 
 
 Thus deeply drinking in the Soul of Things, 
 
 We shall be wise perforce ; and while inspired 
 
 By choice, and conscious that the "Will is free, 
 
 Unswerving shall we move, as if impelled 
 
 By strict necessity, along the path 
 
 Of order and of good. Whate'er we see, 
 
 Whate'er we feel, by agency direct 
 
 Or indirect shall tend to feed and nurse 
 
 Our faculties, shall fix in calmer seats 
 
 Of moral strength, and raise to loftier heights 
 
 Of love divine, our intellectual Soul." 
 
 W. S. Johnson, " Nassau Steam Press," 60, St. Martin's Lane. 
 

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