And it is just as impossible that those changes for the human relief which the propounder of the New Logic propounded as its chief end, should ever be effected by means of the popular terms which our metaphysicians are still allowed to retain in the highest fields of professional practice, as it would have been to effect those lesser reforms which this logic has already achieved, if those old elementary terms, earth, fire, air, water,—terms which antiquity thought fine enough; which passed the muster of the ancient schools without suspicion, had never to this hour been analyzed.
It is just as easy to suppose that we could have had our magnetic telegraphs, and daguerreotypes, and our new Materia Medica, and all the new inventions of modern science for man's relief, if the terms which were simple terms in the vocabulary of Aristotle and Pliny, had never been tested with the edge of the New Machine, and divided with its divine fire, if they had not ceased to be in the schools at least elementary; it is just as easy to suppose this, as it is to suppose that the true and nobler ends of science can ever be attained, so long as the powers that are actual in our human life, which are still at large in all their blind instinctive demoniacal strength there, which still go abroad free-footed, unfettered of science there, while we chain the lightning, and send it on our errands,—so long as these still slip through the ring of our airy 'words,' still riot in the freedom of our large generalizations, our sublime abstractions,— so long as a mere human word-ology is suffered to remain here, clogging all with its deadly impotence,—keeping out the true generalizations with their grappling-hooks on the particulars, —the creative word of art which man learns from the creating wisdom, —the word to which rude nature bows anew,—the word which is Power.
But while the world is resounding with those new relations to the powers of nature which the science of nature has established in other fields, in that department of it, which its Founder tells us is 'the end and term of Natural Science in the intention of man,' in that department of it to which his labor was directed; we are still given over to the inventions of Aristotle, applied to those rude conceptions and theories of the nature of things which the unscientific ages have left to us. Here we have still the loose generalization, the untested affirmation, the arrogant pre-conception, the dogmatic assumption. Here we have the mere phenomena of the human speciality put forward as science, without any attempt to find their genera,—to trace them to that which is more known to nature, so as to connect them practically with the diversity and opposition, which the actual conditions of practice present.
We have not, in short, the scientific language here yet. The vices and the virtues do not understand the names by which we call them, and undertake to command them. Those are not the names in that 'infinite book of secrecy' which they were taught in. They find a more potent order there.
And thus it is, that the demons of human life go abroad here still, impervious alike to our banning and our blessing. The powers of nature which are included in the human nature,—the powers which in this specific form of them we are undertaking to manage with these vulgar generalizations, tacked together with the Aristotelian logic—these powers are no more amenable to any such treatment in this form, than they are in those other forms, in which we are learning to approach them with another vocabulary.
The forces which are developed in the human life will not answer to the names by which we call them here, any more than the lightning would answer to the old Magician's incantation,—any more than it would have come if the old Logician had called it by his name,—which was just as good as the name—and no better, than the name, which the priest of Baal gave it,—any more than it would have come, if the old Logician had undertaken to fetch it, with the harness of his syllogism.
But when the new Logician, who was the new Magician, came, with 'the part operative' of his speculation; with his 'New Machine,' with the rod of his new definition, with the staff of his genera and species,—when the right name was found for it, it heard, it heard afar, it heard in its heaven and came. It came fast enough then. It was 'asleep,' but it awaked. It was 'taking a journey' but it came. There was no affectation of the graces of the gods when the new interpreter and prophet of nature, who belonged to the new order of Interpreters, sent up his little messenger, without any pomp or ceremony, or 'windy suspiration of forced breath,' and fetched it.
But that was an Occidental philosopher, one of the race who like to see effects of some kind, when there is nothing in the field to forbid it. That was one of the Doctors who are called in this system 'Interpreters of nature,' to distinguish them from those who 'rashly anticipate' it. He did not make faces, and cut himself with knives and lances, after a prescribed manner, and prophesy until evening, though there was no voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. He knew that that god at least would not stop on his journey; or if, peradventure, he slept, would not be wakened by any such process.
And the farther the world proceeds on that 'new road' it is travelling at present, the more the demand will be heard in this quarter, for an adaptation of instrumentalities to the advanced, and advancing ages of modern learning and civilization, and to that more severe and exacting genius of the occidental races, that keener and more subtle, and practical genius, from whose larger requisitions and powers this advancement proceeds.