The senses of the savage will
furnish him with facts enough to set him up as a philosopher.
The ancients can still speak to us with authority, even on the
themes of geology and chemistry, though these studies are thought
to have had their birth in modern times. Much is said about the
progress of science in these centuries. I should say that the
useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had
been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for
posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding
experience. How can we _know_ what we are _told_ merely? Each
man can interpret another's experience only by his own. We read
that Newton discovered the law of gravitation, but how many who
have heard of his famous discovery have recognized the same truth
that he did? It may be not one. The revelation which was then
made to him has not been superseded by the revelation made to any
successor.
We see the _planet_ fall,
And that is all.
In a review of Sir James Clark Ross's Antarctic Voyage of
Discovery, there is a passage which shows how far a body of men
are commonly impressed by an object of sublimity, and which is
also a good instance of the step from the sublime to the
ridiculous.
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