n feeling.
Persons in general look at the magnificent fabric of civilized society as
the result of the accumulated labour, ingenuity, and enterprise of man
through a long course of ages, without attempting to define what has been
owing to the different branches of human industry and science; and
usually attribute to politicians, statesmen, and warriors a much greater
share than really belongs to them in the work: what they have done is in
reality little. The beginning of civilization is the discovery of some
useful arts by which men acquire property, comforts, or luxuries. The
necessity or desire of preserving them leads to laws and social
institutions. The discovery of peculiar arts gives superiority to
particular nations; and the love of power induces them to employ this
superiority to subjugate other nations, who learn their arts, and
ultimately adopt their manners; so that in reality the origin, as well as
the progress and improvement, of civil society is founded in mechanical
and chemical inventions. No people have ever arrived at any degree of
perfection in their institutions who have not possessed in a high degree
the useful and refined arts. The comparison of savage and civilized man,
in fact, demonstrates the triumph of chemical and mechanical philosophy
as the causes not only of the physical, but ultimately even of moral
improvement. Look at the condition of man in the lowest state in which
we are acquainted with him. Take the native of New Holland, advanced
only a few steps above the animal creation, and that principally by the
use of fire; naked, defending himself against wild beasts or killing them
for food only by weapons made of wood hardened in the fire, or pointed
with stones or fish bones; living only in holes dug out of the earth, or
in huts rudely constructed of a few branches of trees covered with grass;
having no approach to the enjoyment of luxuries or even comforts; unable
to provide for his most pressing wants; having a language scarcely
articulate, relating only to the great objects of nature, or to his most
pressing necessities or desires, and living solitary or in single
families, unacquainted with religion, government, or laws, submitted to
the mercy of nature or the elements. How different is man in his highest
state of cultivation; every part of his body covered with the products of
different chemical and mechanical arts made not only useful in protecting
him from the inclemency of t