Our minds feel inward satisfaction, when they not only perceive the balm, which flows from the laws of human nature, but see it spread, and make its way among mankind, even against their wills, from its natural force. God himself could not divest man of the capability of error; but he implanted this in the nature of human mistakes, that soon or late they should show themselves to be such, and become evident to the calculating creature. No prudent sovereign of Europe now governs his provinces, as did the kings of Persia, or even the Romans themselves; if not from philanthropic motives, yet from a clearer insight into the business, as with the course of time political calculation has become more certain, easy, and perspicuous. A madman only would build Egyptian pyramids in our days; and any one, that should attempt such useless enterprises, would be deemed insane by all the rational part of the World, if not from his want of love for the people, yet from considerations of economy. The bloody combats of gladiators, and barbarous fights with animals, are no longer suffered among us: the human species has run through these wild tricks of youth, and learned at length to see, that its mad frolics cost more than they are worth. In like manner, we no longer require the poor oppressed slaves of the Romans, or helots of Sparta; because in our constitutions we know how to obtain more easily from free beings, what they accomplished with more danger, and even expense, by means of human animals: nay the time must come, when we shall look back with as much compassion on our inhuman traffic in Negroes, as on the ancient Roman Slaves, or Spartan helots; if not from humanity, yet from calculation. In short, we have to thank God, for having given us, with our weak fallible nature, reason, that immortal beam from his sun, the essence of which it is to dispel night, and show things in their real forms.
3. The progress of arts and inventions puts into the hands of man increasing means of restraining or rendering innocuous, what Nature herself cannot eradicate.
The surface of the sea must be ruffled by storms, and the mother of all things could not dispense with them for man’s advantage. But what did she bestow on him, to compensate these? The art of navigation. These very storms excited man, to invent the elaborate structure of his complicated ship, which enables him not merely to escape the storm, but to profit by its rage, and sail on its wings.
The wandering mariner, tossed on the ocean, could not call the sons of Tyndarus to appear and direct him on his course; accordingly he himself invented his guide the compass, and fought in the skies his Dioscuri, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. Thus equipped with art he launched out on the boundless ocean, and braved it from the equator to the Arctic Circle.
Nature could not take from man the destructive element of fire, without depriving him of manhood itself: but then, what did she bestow on him by means of fire? Multifarious art: art not only to set bounds to the devouring poison, and render it innocent, but even to employ it for a thousand beneficial purposes.
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