s, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are
entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the
degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would
have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would
have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men,
women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment
have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the
Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what
would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante,
Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor
Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been
born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of
the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments
of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of
the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with
its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of
these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser
sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the
aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the
direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.

[12] Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was
essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere
reasoners.

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how
to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the
produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought,
is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in
morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser
and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let '_I dare
not_ wait upon _I would_, like the poor cat in the adage.' We want the
creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous
impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our
calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can
digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the
limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of
the poetical faculty, pr