Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/236

232 history but of a revolution, may appeal at once to human nature. So while they are more historical, fond of names and precedents, enamoured of limited facts and coy towards abstract and universal ideas, with the maxim, " Stand by the fixed," we are more metaphysical, ideal; do not think a thins; right because actual, nor impossible because it has never seen. The Americans ore more metaphysical than the English; have departed more from the old sensational philosophy, have welcomed more warmly the transcendental philosophy of Germany and France. The Declaration or Independence, and all tho State Constitutions of the North, begin with a universal and abstract idea. Even preaching is abstract and of ideas. Calvinism bears metaphysical fruit in New England.

This fact modifies still more the function of the duty of the scholar. It determines him to ideas, to facts for the ideas they cover, not so much to the past as the future, to the past only that he may guide tho present and construct the future. He is to take his run in the past to acquire the momentum of history, his stand in the present, and leap into the future. In this manner the position and duty of the scholar in America are modified and made peculiar; and thus is the mode determined for him, in which to pay for his education in the manner most profitable to the public that has been at the cost of his training.

There is a test by which we measure the force of a horse or a steam-engine; the raising of so many pounds through so many feet in a given time. The test of the scholar's power 16 his ability to raise men. in their development.

In America there are three chief modes of acting upon the public, omitting others of small account. The first is the power which comes of National Wealth; the next, that of Political Station; the third, power of Spiritual Wealth, so to say, eminent wisdom, justice, love, piety, the power of sentiments and ideas, and f he faculty of communicating them to other men, and organizing them therein. For the sake of shortness, let each mode of power be symbolized by its instrument, and we have the power of the purse, of the office, and the pen.

The purse represents the favourite mode of power with us. This is natural in our present stage of national exist-