which this discourse is intended to illustrate. And one who has once tracked the dramatic development of this text, through all this moving exhibition of human society, and its violated rule in nature, will be at no loss to conjecture out of what 'New' book it comes, if indeed that book has ever been opened to him.
The whole subject is treated here scientifically—that is, from without. The generalizations of the higher stages of philosophy—the axioms of a universal philosophy—with all the force of their universality, must be brought to bear upon it, through all its developments. The universal historical laws, in that modification of them which the speciality of the human kind creates, must be impartially set forth here. The law of DUTY, as the NATURAL LAW of human society; the law of humanity, as the law, nay, THE FORM, of the HUMAN kind, stamped on it with the Creator's stamp, that order from the universal law of kinds that gives to all life its SPECIAL bounds, its 'border in itself'—that form so essential, that there is no humanity or kind-ness where that is not—that law which we hear so much of, in its narrower aspects, under various names, in all men's speech, is produced here, in its broader relations, as the necessary basis of a scientific social art. And it is this author's deliberate opinion as a Naturalist, it is the opinion of this School in Natural Science, from which this work proceeds, that those who undertake to compose human societies, large or small, whether in families, or states, or empires, without recognising this principle—those who undertake to compose UNIONS, human unions and societies, on any other principle—will have a diabolical jangle of it when all is done. For this law of unity, which is written on the soul of man, this law of CONSCIENCE within, is written without also; and to erase it within is to get the lesson from without in that universal and downright speech and language which the axioms of nature are taught in—it is to get it in that fearful school in which nature repeats the doctrine of her violated law, for those who are not able to solve and comprehend the science of it as it is written—written beforehand—in the natural law and constitutions of the human soul.
'That nature which, contemns its ORIGIN
Cannot be bordered certain in itself.'
[These are the mysteries of day and night, that Lear, in his ignorance, vainly invokes, the operations of the orbs from whom we do exist and cease to be.]
'She that herself will sliver and disbranch
From her material sap, perforce must wither,
And come to deadly use.'
'The text is—FOOLISH.'
The teacher who takes it upon himself to get out this text from the text-book of Universal Laws, for the purpose of conducting it to its practical application in human affairs, for the purpose of suggesting the true remedy for those great human wants which he exhibits here, is not one of those 'Milk-livered men,' those Moral Fools, that Goneril delicately alludes to, who bear a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs; who have not in their brows an eye discerning their honour from their sufferance; who think it enough to sit still under the murderous blows of what they call misfortune, fate, Providence, when it is their own im-providence; who think it is enough to sit still, and cry, Alack! without inquiring what it is that makes that lack; without ever putting the question in earnest, 'Why does he so?' His Play is all full of the practical application of the text, the application of it which Gloster sums up in a word—
''T is the Time's plague when MADMEN lead THE BLIND.'
'I will preach to thee. Mark me: [says Lear]
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of FOOLS. [Mark me!']
The whole Play is one magnificent intimation, on the part of the Poet, that eyes are made to see with; and that there is no so natural and legitimate use of them as that which human affairs were crying for, through all their lengths and breadths, in his time. It is that eye which is one of the distinctive features of the human kind; that eye which looks before and after, which extends human vision so far beyond individual sensuous experience, which is able to converge the light of universal truth upon particular experience, which is able to bring the infallible guidance of universal axioms into all the particulars of human conduct—that is the eye which he finds wanting in human affairs. The play is pointing everywhere with the Poet's scorn of 'Blind Men,' 'who will not see because they do not feel,'—who wait for the blows of 'fortune,' to teach them the lesson of Nature's laws—who wait to be scourged, or dashed to pieces with 'the sequent effect,' instead of making use of their faculty of reason to ascend to causes, and so 'to trammel up the consequence.'
It is that same combination of human faculties, that same combination of sense and reason, which the Novum Organum provides for; it is that same scorn of abstract wordy speculation, on the one hand, and blind experimental groping, on the other, that is everywhere suggested here. But with the aid of the persons of the Drama, and their suggestions, the new philosophy is carried into departments which it would have cost the Author of the Novum Organum and the Advancement of Learning his head to look into. He might as well have proposed to impeach the Government in Parliament outright, as to offer to advance his Novum Organum into these fields; fields which it enters safely enough under the cover of a spontaneous, inspired, dramatic philosophy, though it is a philosophy which overflows continually with those practical axioms, those aphorisms, which the Author of the Advancement of Learning assures us 'are made of the pith and heart of sciences'; and that 'no man can write who is not sound and grounded.' But then, if they are only written in 'with a goose-pen,' they pass well enough for unconscious, unmeaning, spontaneous felicities.