Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/182

Rh to-day; between this "Indian country" of 1555, and the Pennsylvania of 1855! All this difference comes from the civilized thought mixed with the savage world of matter. The advance is progression by experiment—wherein many attempts fail. Of all the inventions recorded in the Patent Office, how few are adopted into permanent use!—the rest are winnowed off as chaff. But without the straw there could have been no corn.

In his historic progress, out of human nature man developes feelings, thoughts, and actions, and thence forms institutions, arts, languages, laws, sciences, states, societies, and the like. All these together make up the world of institutions. A machine is a contrivance of thought organized in matter; an institution a contrivance of thought organized in man. Of each there are many forms.

All the feelings, all the thoughts, all the actions, with all the manifold institutions of these thousand million men now on earth, have grown out of human nature, and correspond to the degree of man's progressive culture thereof; just as all the vegetation of the earth has grown out of its soil, and represents its climate, the richness of the ground, and the advance of the season, all varying continually. Since the world was created all vegetation has been domestic development, not foreign importation: not a camomile flower, not an apple- seed has been brought in from abroad—or could have been. These institutions have come partly from the instincts of men— acting blindly, not knowing whither they went; partly also from deliberate affection and conscious will—men setting a purpose and then devising means for that end. But all these institutions are of human origin, as much so as the machines—the family and the state not less than the axe of stone or iron, the farm or the railroad.

In our world of institutions there are also two parts— the inherited, and the newly created. Each partakes of the character of the age whence it came. The traditional must be revised; some of it is good for the present—nay, for all time; some must be left to perish. The original will be winnowed in the same way by such as come after us. Once the polygamous family of the savage, with his captive wives whom force subordinated to him but no mutual love conjoined, was the best domestic institution of