It is a development of this philosophy, which was deliberately
postponed by the great Scientific Discoverers and Reformers, in whose
Scientific Discoveries and Reformations our organised advancements in
speculation and practice have their origin;--Reformers, whose
scientific acquaintance with historic laws forbade the idea of any
immediate and sudden cures of the political and social evils which
their science searches to the root, and which it was designed to
eradicate.

The proposition to be demonstrated in the ensuing pages is this: That
the new philosophy which strikes out from the Court--from _the Court_
of that despotism that names and gives form to the Modern
Learning,--which comes to us from the Court of the last of the Tudors
and the first of the Stuarts,--that new philosophy which we have
received, and accepted, and adopted as a practical philosophy, not
merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us
professionally _as_ philosophy, but in that not less important
department of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise of
amusement,--in the form of fable and allegory and parable,--the
proposition is, that this Elizabethan philosophy is, in these two
forms of it,--not two philosophies,--not two Elizabethan philosophies,
not two new and wondrous philosophies of nature and practice, not two
new Inductive philosophies, but one,--one and the same: that it is
philosophy in both these forms, with its veil of allegory and parable,
and without it; that it is philosophy applied to much more important
subjects in the disguise of the parable, than it is in the open
statement; that it is philosophy in both these cases, and not
philosophy in one of them, and a brutish, low-lived, illiterate,
unconscious spontaneity in the other.