A discourse on the privileges and duties of man as a progressive being : delivered before the New-York Alpha of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, July 23, 1833 / by Benjamin F. Joslin.

  • Joslin, Benjamin F. (Benjamin Franklin), 1796-1861.
Date:
1833
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A discourse on the privileges and duties of man as a progressive being : delivered before the New-York Alpha of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, July 23, 1833 / by Benjamin F. Joslin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    author of the Novum Organum achieved, by systematizing and rendering universal that inductive method, which had before been but occasionally, partially, and empirically practiced, these official acts of Bacon are insignificant in relation to the great interests of the human race. Every real contribution to human knowledge makes an indelible impress on the condition of man; it affects future and distant ages; and when many events which strongly excite the public mind, but which are transient in their con- sequences, shall have been forgotten, the great benefactors of science will be remembered. When heroic but ill-fated Poland was engaged in her last sanguinary and unequal conflict; when her own critical situation might be supposed to have created an all-absorbing interest, she nevertheless forgot not the great concerns of the human intellect, nor her own Copernicus, that Son of earth, to whom the power was given To measure the mysterious march of heaven. A statue erected to his memory in Warsaw, was then, after ten years' labor, completed and unveiled to the public.— The enthusiasm excited in that generous people by this ex- hibition, evinces a heroism not surpassed by them in the field of battle, and at the same time attests the moral grandeur of the progress of science. The inhabitants of that devoted city, assembled around the monument, were addressed by one of their aged fellow-citizens. He said that three centu- ries had passed since Copernicus had been gathered to the bosom of that earth, whose motion round the central sun he had revealed. That the forgetfulness of the great ser- vices of the great, was usually succeeded by the outburstings of grateful remembrance, and that posterity often dragged forth to immortal memory the names which had been rest- ing in temporary oblivion. Now, said he, after ten years: