Few Detect The Morality In The Former, Or The
Science In The Latter.
Aristotle defined art to be , _The principle of the work without the
wood_; but most men prefer to have some of the wood along with
the principle; they demand that the truth be clothed in flesh and
blood and the warm colors of life.
They prefer the partial
statement because it fits and measures them and their commodities
best. But science still exists everywhere as the sealer of
weights and measures at least.
We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very
little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion
of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful
statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form.
We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of
arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. All the
moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for
often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words
by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal
instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already
_supernatural_ philosophy. The whole body of what is now called
moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract
science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature
are the purest morality. The Tree of Knowledge is a Tree of
Knowledge of good and evil.
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