SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

PROF. HENRY, the distinguished savan, and head of the Smithsonian an Institute, testifies that he knows but one man among the scientific men of the United States who is an infidel. This fact speaks volumes, and shows conclusively that the lights of science have any other tendency than to make men skeptical or unbelievers. It is usually your pretenders to scientific knowledge, or men wholly destitute of any scientific attainments, who disbelieve, or affect to do so. As a general remark, we think it will be found that a vast majority of them belong to the latter class, being wholly ignorant, or, what is worse, mere smatterer. Lord Bacon tells us “a little philosophy inclineth a man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth man’s mind about to religion.

For all practical purposes, true science is a thorough knowledge of a man’s own business.

It is the work of a philosopher to be every day subduing his passions and. laying aside his prejudices. A philosopher never deems any man beneath his notice; for there is no mind that can not furnish some scraps of intellectual entertainment.

Practical philosophy is that which enables us to look at the ills of life, its disappointments and its diseases, in a manner which does much to surmount them and deprive them of the power to do any permanent injury. True philosophy has no pretense about it; no chicanery, no fraud; it does not worry itself in the endeavor to make the worse appear the better reason, or in making troublesome concealments; on the contrary, it finds happiness and a grateful relief even in a frankness which endangers a storm of ridicule.