Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
     The proper study of mankind is man.

This is the declaration of the great poet Pope, and a glance across the world’s literature will show that the mandate was unneeded.  For ages before the birth of the celebrated “wasp of Twickenham,” mankind had been at study on the subject.  “The burden of history” says George Finlayson, “is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology, what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall be.”  “Man is the product of his own history,” says Theodore Parker.  “The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him.  The greatest star is that at the end of the telescope—­

THE STAR THAT IS LOOKING, NOT LOOKED AFTER,

nor looked at.”  “Man is greater than a world, than systems of worlds; there is more mystery in the union of soul with the physical than in the creation of the universe.”  This sentence is by Henry Giles.  To the first portion of it I give unqualified belief.  I believe, too, with John Ruskin, that “the basest thought possible concerning man is that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature.  For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual—­coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.”  “Man is the metre of all things,” says Aristotle,

“THE HAND

is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.”  The remark of the great Athenian regarding the hand, while no truer than that one touching the mind, is yet easier of demonstration to the unphilosophical reader.  For instance, the printers of the finest engravings to this day use the palm of the hand to apply the ink; the type-setting machine is so far a failure for the want of the human fingers; the most perfect performance of music on a machine yet lacks that sympathy and exception to mathematical rule which the human fingers, highly trained, impart to the keyboard, and the violin, that thing most nearly in communication with the soul of man,—­pays no allegiance whatever save to the human hand well practiced in its mastery; the hand skilled in love soothes the aching brow; the whole framework of this instrument, the hand, filled with gold coins, almost without volition spurns the spurious piece; the false bank-note is lifted with suspicion; across the signature the deft fingers run to aid the eye; over the letters the mind of the sightless pushes its loyal touch, and the signal comes faithfully back to the dungeoned intelligence!

OUR OPPORTUNITIES

are the greatest of those of any living beings.  It follows, it seems to me, that our responsibilities should be greater, both in justice and in reason.  Every opportunity is equivalent to a duty.  We owe—­with all these miracles of the living world centered and perfected in our bodies,—­a duty equally grand and difficult.  Let us ennoble ourselves.  John Fletcher wrote a beautiful metaphor in very clumsy verse when he said: