Hugh Miller: Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The compl...

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

Hugh Miller

heartbroken encouraging broken-heart

Life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study.

Hugh Miller

school-life study school

Prayer is so mighty an instrument that no one ever thoroughly mastered all its keys. They sweep along the infinite scale of man's wants and God's goodness.

Hugh Miller

keys prayer men

Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain.

Hugh Miller

nature keys science

The footprint of the savage traced in the sand is sufficient to attest the presence of man to the atheist who will not recognize God, whose hand is impressed upon the entire universe.

Hugh Miller

atheist men hands

The sky is full of tokens which speak to the intelligent.

Hugh Miller

intelligent speak sky

It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed.

Hugh Miller

hospitality excellent thank-you

No true geologist holds by the development hypothesis;-it has been resigned to sciolists and smatterers;-and there is but one other alternative. They began to be, through the miracle of creation. From the evidence furnished by these rocks we are shut down either to belief in miracle, or to something else infinitely harder of reception, and as thoroughly unsupported by testimony as it is contrary to experience. Hume is at length answered by the severe truths of the stony science.

Hugh Miller

rocks truth science

All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species-of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.

Hugh Miller

development science history

Poets need be in no degree jealous of the geologists. The stony science, with buried creations for its domains, and half an eternity charged with its annals, possesses its realms of dim and shadowy fields, in which troops of fancies already walk like disembodied ghosts in the old fields of Elysium, and which bid fair to be quite dark and uncertain enough for all the purposes of poesy for centuries to come.

Hugh Miller

jealous dark science

It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, life fruit in the thick of a wood; but where people are planted sparely it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or an espalier. It flourishes where the inn and lodging-house cannot exist.

Hugh Miller

apples men people

The primary rocks, ... I regard as the deposits of a period in which the earth's crust had sufficiently cooled down to permit the existence of a sea, with the necessary denuding agencies,-waves and currents,-and, in consequence, of deposition also; but in which the internal heat acted so near the surface, that whatever was deposited came, matter of course, to be metamorphosed into semi-plutonic forms, that retained only the stratification.

Hugh Miller

rocks agency sea

The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records, finds no examples of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty-"the kingdom"-not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form man.

Hugh Miller

future men science

But should we continue to linger amid a scene so featureless and wild, or venture adown some yawning opening into the abyss beneath, where all is fiery and yet dark,-a solitary hell, without suffering or sin,-we would do well to commit ourselves to the guidance of a living poet of the true faculty,-Thomas Aird and see with his eyes.

Hugh Miller

yawning eye dark

The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond.

Hugh Miller

yesterday science years

The development doctrines are doing much harm on both sides of the Atlantic, especially among intelligent mechanics, and a class of young men engaged in the subordinate departments of trade and the law. And the harm, thus considerable in amount, must be necessarily more than merely considerable in degree. For it invariably happens, that when persons in these walks become materialists, they become turbulent subjects and bad men.

Hugh Miller

intelligent men science

But, in truth, the existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The footprint on the sand — to refer to his happy illustration — does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level.

Hugh Miller

illustration feet science

That special substance according to whose mass and degree of development all the creatures of this world take rank in the scale of creation, is not bone, but brain.

Hugh Miller

special brain science

Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.

Hugh Miller

man sad society world

But the advice was not taken - Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension; and I fear - though I failed to trace his after history - that he suffered in consequence.

Hugh Miller

canada fear advice history

Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth.