vation of a people's own resources and increase of its wealth.
Wealth is obtained by the addition of mental power to physical products,
increasing their value for supplying the wants of man. So that attention
to physical comfort and prosperity which was despised by the brave
nations of antiquity, is now the leading object of government: treaties
are made, wars are declared, rebellions break out, not on account of
national glory or right, but in consideration of cotton manufacture,
facilities of commerce, or freedom of trade. Nations as well as men are
absorbed in the same great pursuit, adding mind to matter for production
of wealth.

From this undue attention to physical prosperity spring certain
subordinate causes, which, upon examination, are found to be the exact
_differentia_ of modern times. The characteristics which distinguish our
age from all others are the very ones which have been found so
destructive to preexistent civilizations. The first characteristic of
this kind is the abundance of outward knowledge. In the pursuit of
wealth, the ocean, the desert, the isles of the sea have been ransacked
for commodities to gratify the desires of man, and, in order that nature
may be pliable for the same purpose in the hands of the artisan, its
laws have been studied with the greatest success; the bowels of the
earth, the depths of the air, the prison of the arctic seas, have all
been subject to the same strict scrutiny in this design.

The knowledge thus obtained comes pouring in by lightning and steam, and
is scattered over the world within the reach of the poorest by means of
the printing press. The man of to-day is a citizen of the world; he
seems to be ubiquitous. It is as though he had a thousand eyes and ears,
and, alas! only one mind. Thought has two conditions: first, knowledge,
as food and stimulus; second, time for distributing and digesting that
knowledge. But the first is so superabundantly fufilled that it entirely
obliterates the second. Knowledge comes pouring in from all quarters so
rapidly, that the man can hardly receive, much less arrange and think
out, the enormous mass of facts daily accumulating upon him. The boasted
age of printing presses and newspapers, of penny magazines, and penny
cyclopaedias, is not necessarily the age of thought. There is a world-

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