4 RADICALISM AND THE NATIONAL CRISIS. This is what I mean by the phrase. This I hold to be the true and proper import of the phrase. I come then,— In the second place, to inquire into the actual history of THIS SPIRIT IN ITS BEARING UPON THE INTELLECTUAL, SOCIAL, POLITICAL, MORAL, AND RELIGIOUS FORTUNES OF THE WORLD. This, aS yOU see, is a question of vast dimensions. The answer that I propose for your acceptance with its reasons, is the following—: That while this spirit has, sometimes by misapprehension, and sometimes by excess, been productive of evil, its general history is one of untold blessings to mankind. If you turn your thoughts to the field of purely scientific research, you will find that the men who have distinguished themselves on this field, and contributed most largely to the advancement of human knowledge, are not the men who have trodden the beaten track of their fathers, governed by the precedents of opinion, and content to retail old ideas, but the bold, the fearless, the original, the radical investigators of truth. These are the men who have made their mark upon the thinking of the world. Lord Bacon, in laying down the fundamental principles which should govern all investigation, and by those principles exposing the sophistries practiced by the schoolmen of the dark ages—; Sir Isaac Newton, in that profound inquest after truth, by which he at length discovered the great law, that gives regularity and harmony to the motion of the heavenly bodies—; Dr. Franklin, in catching the lightnings of heaven with a key, and resolving their phenomena into an electrical agency—; our own illustrious Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, in conceiving both the idea and the mechanism by winch he could give a tongue to this agency—; John Locke, in his deep exploration of the origin of knowledge, correcting many of the cherished errors of former times—; these, and men of like.stamp, were intellectual radi- calists, going to the bottom of things, advancing beyond the ideas which had preceded them, and cutting for themselves and for the world new channels in the great domain of thought. Plato did this in his age, and Aristotle, in his age. Such men refuse to bow to the authority of mere precedents. Assuming that ideas must at last rule the world, they not only drive the plough
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