We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies.

The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.

There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure.

But we let “I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat i’ the adage.”¹  We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind?

From what other cause has it arisen that these inventions which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?²

Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.³

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¹ The words with which Lady Macbeth encourages her husband’s ambition (Macbeth 1.7.44-45).

² God says to Adam: “cursed is the ground for thy sake… . Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth… . In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3.17-19)

³ Matthew 6.24: “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.”

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