Without knowledge there can be no sure Progress. Vice and barbarism are the inseparable companions of ignorance. Nor is it too much to say, that, except in rare instances, the highest virtue is attained only through intelligence. This is natural; for to do right, we must first understand what is right. But the people of Greece and Rome, even in the brilliant days of Pericles and Augustus, could not arrive at this knowledge. The sublime teachings of Plato and Socrates—calculated in many respects to promote the best interests of the race—were limited in influence to a small company of listeners, or to the few who could obtain a copy of the costly manuscripts in which they were preserved. Thus the knowledge and virtue acquired by individuals were not diffused in their own age or secured to posterity.
Now, at last, through an agency all unknown to Antiquity, knowledge of every kind has become general and permanent. It can no longer be confined to a select circle. It cannot be crushed by tyranny, or lost by neglect. It is immortal as the soul from which it proceeds. This alone renders all relapse into barbarism impossible, while it affords an unquestionable distinction between ancient and modern times. The Press, watchful with more than the hundred eyes of Argus, strong with more than the hundred arms of Briareus, not only guards all the conquests of civilization, but leads the way to future triumphs. Through its untiring energies, the meditation of the closet, or the utterance of the human voice, which else would die away within the precincts of a narrow room, is prolonged to the most distant nations and times, with winged words circling the globe. We admire the genius of Demosthenes, Sophocles, Plato, and Phidias; but the printing-press is a higher gift to man than the eloquence, the drama, the philosophy, and the art of Greece.
There is yet another country which presents a problem for the student of Progress. In vivid phrase Sir James Mackintosh pictures the "ancient and immovable civilization of China."[262] But in these words he spoke rather from impressions than from actual knowledge. By the side of the impulsive movement of modern Europe, the people of this ancient empire may appear stationary; but it can hardly be doubted that they have advanced, though according to a scale unlike our own. It is difficult to assign satisfactory reasons for the seeming inertness of their national life. Perhaps I shall not err, if I refer it to peculiar constitutional characteristics,—to inherent difficulties of their language as an instrument of knowledge,—to national vanity on an exaggerated scale, making them look down upon others,—to an insulation excluding all others,—and also to the habit of unhesitating deference to Antiquity, and of "backward-looking thoughts," cultivated by the Chinese from the distant days of Confucius. They do not know the Law of Human Progress.
In receiving this law, two conditions of Humanity are recognized: first, its unity or solidarity; and, secondly, its indefinite duration upon earth. And now of these in their order.
1. It is true, doubtless, that there are various races of men; but there is but one great Human Family, in which Caucasian, Ethiopian, Chinese, and Indian are all brothers, children of one Father, and heirs to one happiness. Though variously endowed, they are all tending in the same direction; nor can the light obtained by one be withheld from any. The ether discovery in Boston will soothe pain hereafter in Africa and in Asia, in Abyssinia and in China. So are we all knit together, that words of wisdom and truth, which first sway the hearts of the American people, may help to elevate benighted tribes of the most distant regions. The vexed question of modern science, whether these races proceeded originally from one stock, does not interfere with the sublime revelation of Christianity, the Brotherhood of Man. In the light of science and of religion, Humanity is an organism, complex, but still one,—throbbing with one life, animated by one soul, every part sympathizing with every other part, and the whole advancing in one indefinite career of Progress.
2. And what is the measure of this career? It is common to speak of the long life already passed by man on earth; but how brief and trivial is this, compared with the countless ages before him! According to received chronology, six thousand years have not yet elapsed since his creation. But the science of Geology, that unimpeached interpreter of the Past, now demonstrates (and here the geology of New York furnishes important evidence), that, anterior to the commencement of human history, this globe had endured for ages upon ages, baffling human calculation and imagination. Without losing ourselves in the stupendous speculations with regard to different geological epochs, before the earth assumed its present figure, and when it was occupied only by races of animals now extinct, it may not be without interest to glance at the age of the epoch in which we live. This, happily, we are able to do.
From the flow of rivers we have a gigantic measure of geological time. It is supposed that the Falls of Niagara were once at Queenstown, and that they have gradually worn their way back in the living rock, for a distance of seven miles, to the place where they now pour their thunders. An ingenious English geologist, a high authority in his science, Sir Charles Lyell, assuming that this retreat might have been at the rate of one foot a year, shows that the cataract must have poured over that rock for a period of at least 36,960 years. And the same authority teaches us that the alluvion at the mouth of the Mississippi, the delta formed by the deposits of that mighty river (here let it be remarked that alluvions and sand-banks are the most recent geological formations on the surface of the earth, being nearest to our own age), could not have been accumulated within a shorter period than 100,500 years.[263] Even this term, so vast to our small imagination, is only one of a series composing the present epoch; and the epoch itself is but a unit in a still grander series. These measurements, adopted in this branch of knowledge, can be little more than vague approximations; but they teach, from the lips of Science, as perhaps nothing else can, the infinite ages through which this globe has already travelled, and the infinite ages which seem to be its future destiny.
Thus we stand now between two infinities,—the infinity of the Past, and the infinity of the Future; and the infinity of the Future is equal to the infinity of the Past. In comparison with these untold spaces before and after, what, indeed, are the six thousand years of human history? In the contemplation of Man, what littleness! what grandeur! how diminutive in the creation! how brief his recorded history! and yet how vast in hopes! how majestic and transcendent in the Future!
If there be any analogy between his life on earth and that of the frailest plant or shell-fish, as now seen in the light of science, he must still be in his earliest and most helpless infancy. In vain speak of Antiquity in his history; for all his present records are as a day, an hour, a moment, in the unimaginable immensity of duration which seems to await the globe and its inhabitants. In the sight of our distant descendants, successive eras of the brief span which we call History will melt into one; and as to present vision stars far asunder seem near together, so Nimrod and Sesostris, Alexander and Cæsar, Tamerlane and Napoleon, will seem to be contemporaries. Nor is it any exaggeration to suppose that in the unborn ages, illumined by a truth now, alas! too dimly perceived, the class of warriors and conquerors, of which these are signal types, will become extinct,—like the gigantic land reptiles and monster crocodileans belonging to a departed period of zoölogical history.