“You make a distinction, of course,” said Mr Escot, “between scientific and moral perfectibility?”

“I conceive,” said Mr Foster, “that men are virtuous in proportion as they are enlightened; and that, as every generation increases in knowledge, it also increases in virtue.”

“I wish it were so,” said Mr Escot; “but to me the very reverse appears to be the fact.  The progress of knowledge is not general:  it is confined to a chosen few of every age.  How far these are better than their neighbours, we may examine by and bye.  The mass of mankind is composed of beasts of burden, mere clods, and tools of their superiors.  By enlarging and complicating your machines, you degrade, not exalt, the human animals you employ to direct them.  When the boatswain of a seventy-four pipes all hands to the main tack, and flourishes his rope’s end over the shoulders of the poor fellows who are tugging at the ropes, do you perceive so dignified, so gratifying a picture, as Ulysses exhorting his dear friends, his ERIAERES ’ETAIROI, to ply their oars with energy?  You will say, Ulysses was a fabulous character.  But the economy of his vessel is drawn from nature.  Every man on board has a character and a will of his own.  He talks to them, argues with them, convinces them; and they obey him, because they love him, and know the reason of his orders.  Now, as I have said before, all singleness of character is lost.  We divide men into herds like cattle:  an individual man, if you strip him of all that is extraneous to himself, is the most wretched and contemptible creature on the face of the earth.  The sciences advance.  True.  A few years of study puts a modern mathematician in possession of more than Newton knew, and leaves him at leisure to add new discoveries of his own.  Agreed.  But does this make him a Newton?  Does it put him in possession of that range of intellect, that grasp of mind, from which the discoveries of Newton sprang?  It is mental power that I look for:  if you can demonstrate the increase of that, I will give up the field.  Energy—­independence—­individuality—­disinterested virtue—­active benevolence—­self-oblivion—­universal philanthropy—­these are the qualities I desire to find, and of which I contend that every succeeding age produces fewer examples.  I repeat it; there is scarcely such a thing to be found as a single individual man; a few classes compose the whole frame of society, and when you know one of a class you know the whole of it.  Give me the wild man of the woods; the original, unthinking, unscientific, unlogical savage:  in him there is at least some good; but, in a civilised, sophisticated, cold-blooded, mechanical, calculating slave of Mammon and the world, there is none—­absolutely none.  Sir, if I fall into a river, an unsophisticated man will jump in and bring me out; but a philosopher will look on with the utmost calmness, and consider me in the light of a projectile, and, making a calculation of the degree of force with which I have impinged the surface, the resistance of the fluid, the velocity of the current, and the depth of the water in that particular place, he will ascertain with the greatest nicety in what part of the mud at the bottom I may probably be found, at any given distance of time from the moment of my first immersion.”