that of man's organic necessities, and the sphere
of His specific action identical with that of man's moral freedom: so
harmonizing the two in one subject. Philosophy alone, in short, is
competent to the future of human destiny, because it alone adjusts the
relation of morals to physics, alone adjusts the specific interests
avouched by religion with the universal interests avouched by science.
And its competence is owing to this fact exclusively, that it alone
apprehends or appreciates the distinctively social destiny of man, a
destiny in which the interests of the most intense and exquisite freedom
or individuality are bound up with the interests of the most imperious
necessity or community,--or, what is the same thing, which presents
every man no longer in subjective or moral, but only in objective or
aesthetic, contrast with his kind, that so the general harmony may be
inflamed by the widest partial diversity. Thus philosophy bids society
recognise itself at once as God's perfect work on earth,--bids it rise
to instant self-consciousness as the real Divine substance which Church
and State have only feebly typified, and put on all Divine strength and
peace as its rightful breastplate and ornament. For if all these
fleeting phenomenal discords among men, upon which our existing
civilization proceeds, claim no longer an absolute, but only a relative
Divine sanction, a sanction in relation to the interests of human
society exclusively, what remains for society to do but to organize
itself afresh upon an eternal basis, that is, upon the acknowledgment of
a force in man infinitely transcending his moral force, because it
forever unites instead of disjoining him with God, being the force of
spontaneous or productive action?

_An Address on the Limits of Education, read before the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology_, November 16th, 1865. By JACOB BIGELOW, M. D.
Boston: E. P. Dutton & Co.

Dr. Bigelow has had the honor of naturalizing, if not of inventing, the
name of the Institute before which he delivered this address. His work
on the Elements of Technology was the first in which this name appeared,
at least in recent times. It designates that class of sciences which
bear on art,--sciences of practical application. Dr. Bigelow, in this
address, places himself emphatically with those who believe that mental
discipline can be obtained as well by useful as by useless studies, and
who think it a waste of time "to spend fi