fine ourselves, at least in the present infantile state of the
anthropologic sciences, to facts; to ascertaining honestly and patiently
the thing which has been done; trusting that if we make ourselves masters
of them, some rays of inductive light will be vouchsafed to us from Him
who truly comprehends mankind, and knows what is in man, because He is
the Son of Man; who has His own true theory of human progress, His own
sound method of educating the human race, perfectly good, and perfectly
wise, and at last, perfectly victorious; which nevertheless, were it
revealed to us to-morrow, we could not understand; for if he who would
comprehend Luther must be more than Luther, what must he be, who would
comprehend God?

Look again, as a result of the disturbing force of genius, at the effects
of great inventions--how unexpected, complex, subtle, all but
miraculous--throwing out alike the path of human history, and the
calculations of the student. If physical discoveries produced only
physical or economic results--if the invention of printing had only
produced more books, and more knowledge--if the invention of gunpowder
had only caused more or less men to be killed--if the invention of the
spinning-jenny had only produced more cotton-stuffs, more employment, and
therefore more human beings,--then their effects would have been, however
complex, more or less subjects of exact computation.

But so strangely interwoven is the physical and spiritual history of man,
that material inventions produce continually the most unexpected
spiritual results. Printing becomes a religious agent, causes not merely
more books, but a Protestant Reformation; then again, through the Jesuit
literature, helps to a Romanist counter-reformation; and by the clashing
of the two, is one of the great causes of the Thirty Years' War, one of
the most disastrous checks which European progress ever suffered.
Gunpowder, again, not content with killing men, becomes unexpectedly a
political agent; 'the villanous saltpetre,' as Ariosto and Shakespeare's
fop complain, 'does to death many a goodly gentleman,' and enables the
masses to cope, for the first time, with knights in armour; thus forming
a most important agent in the rise of the middle classes; while the
spinning-jenny, not content with furnishing facts for the political
economist, and employment for millions, helps to extend slavery in the
United States, and gives rise to moral and political questions, w