The Sun.
London, England, 1853-02-21 00:00:00

~.,...a......

etas :

" Let me conceive myself to have been installed your
Chancellor of the Exchequer intellectual ; and here, at your
service, is my Budget ; but it will be forced to deal very
summarily with the Income and Expenditure of THOtrGHT
—its Resources—its Ways and Means—and the circulating
medium of that thought—which is language or literature.
I cannot, alas ! hold out the hopes of taking off any taxes,
but, on the contrary, must impose a somewhat heavy one
on your attention !"

Thereupon he entered upon a serious considera-
tion of the avowed subject of his discourse, the
intellectual and moral development of the age,
showing
inby progressive steps the advances made
by man the examination of the wonders of the
universe, and his own signal elevation in know-
ledge. It is exquisitely disclaimed by our author,
however, at the very outset of this daring adven-
ture, that his purpose is far from being any attempt
at an ostentatious.display of man's doings and dis-
coveries—but rather to demonstrate the mere clearly
that Newton was right when he compared him-
self to a child on the shore of the great ocean of
Truth picking up shells and pebbles. Indeed, after
reviewing the bulk of the intellectual achievements
of the human race here enumerated with so much
lucidity, we feel our mind humbled before the still
impenetrable veil of ignorance shutting us out from
the comprehension of an inexplicable infinitude.
With all our extraordinary triumphs through the
aid of natural philosophy—with all our revelations
drawn from the minute by the microscope, and
from the vast and remote by the telescope—with all
the light thrown by our researches into the crust of
the earth through geology, and into the abysses of
space through astronomy—we still stand, the wisest
of us still stand, baffled before a countless series of
phenomena defying anything like a rational expla-
nation. It is actually in this respect as though we
required new senses to admit of our extending our
knowledge by the recognition of one fact in these mys-
tical directions. We have carried our proficiencyin
the physical sciences so far that we have our streets
lighted by gas, and our seas traversed by steam-
boats, and our lands threaded by railroads, and the
press everywhere, and thought flashing to and fro
over continents and from shore to shore, trailed
along the bed of the ocean, communicating visibly
and audibly with the rapidity of lightning, with
people hundreds of miles away, by means of the
electric telegraph. We have accomplished all this
and more—we have enabled ourselves to grow cop-
per from a transparent solution, to sketch one
another's portraits by the sunbeam;
to weigh the
sun and the planets as we would weigh any other
substance by avoirdupois—nay, we have measure'
the distance of those heavenly bodies froth this
earth as we would measure one of the gravel walks
of our garden with a two-foot rule—and yet, with
all this, what do we know- of the phenomenon of
existence I—how far have we advanced towards the
establishment of a single truth of metaphysics ?
During the course of the masterly dissertatiozi be-
fore us, Mr. Warren contrasts in a startling man-
ner this ignorance and this knowledge, this weak-
ness and this strength, this capacity and incapacith
which make up the disordered force of the human
intellect. Throughout all this, moreover, he brings
the whole energy of his nature, the whole earnestness
of his convictions, the whole power of his logic, and
all the persuasion of his eloquence, to bear upon
that evil phantom of infidelity which has latterly
been tricked out in obsolete sophistries to frighten
the weak minds and craven hearts of the grown
children of our generation. This alone was a ma-
jestic purpose to hold before him in the tours.'' of
his dissertation, and nobly, and bravely, and for-
vently has it been sustained by him throughout.
Among the more entertaining passages in the essay
are those in which the writer surveys the various
departments of science and of literature in refer-
ence to their present state of development. About
passage in the volume is that expressly
to the vindication (if one may dare to say
so without
impiety) of the truth of the Holy Scrip-
the
Scrip-
tures, and of the beneficence of Christianity. We
could willingly gratify ourselves with quotation
after quotation, but that even one of any length
would be scarcely fair in regard to a dissertation so,
brief and well-ordered. Nothing remains to be
added, therefore, to our foregoing remarks but
that while in this lecture Mr. Warren has afforded.
the world a new illustration of his abilities, he b 405
given • Hull fresh cause to be proud of her Recorder,
and benefited the community by a novel and ele-
vating contribution to our popular literature.