Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/39

22 never- dying song? Yet what a mass of literature has come into being within the last sixty years to settle these two questions! How the famous scholars light their lamps and dim their eyes over this work, and how the world rejoices in their books, which will not bake bread, nor make two blades of grass grow where only one rose up before; which will not build a railroad, nor elect a president, nor give a man an office in any custom-house of the wide world! There is a deep love of truth in men, even in these poor details. A natural king looks royal at the plough.

How men study yet higher modes of truth, writ in the facts of human consciousness! How the ablest men have worked at the severest forms of intellectual toil, yet proposing no gain to themselves, only the glorious godliness of truth! A corporeal gain to men does come from every such truth. There is such a solidarity betwixt the mind and body, that each spiritual truth works welfare in the material world, and the most abstract of ideas becomes concrete in the widest universe of welfare. But philosophers love the truth before they learn its material use. Aristotle, making an exhaustive analysis of the mind of man, did not design to build a commonwealth in New England, and set up public schools.

This love of truth, instinctive and reflective both, is so powerful in human nature, that mankind will not rest till we have an idea corresponding to every fact of Nature and of human consciousness, and the contents of the universe are repeated in the cosmic mind of man, which grasps the whole of things. The philosophic work of observation, analysis, and synthesis, will not be over till the whole world of material nature is comprehended by the world of human nature. Such is our love, not only of special truths, but of total truth. Consider what an apparatus man has devised to aid the search for truth: not only visible tools to magnify the little and bring near us the remote, but the invisible weapons of the mind,—mathematics and the various sciences, the mining-tools with which we dig for truth,—logic, the Lydian stone to test the true,—rhetoric, the art to communicate,—language, speech itself, the most amazing