The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the
limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of
the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal
world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree
disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the
basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention
for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the
inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the
discoveries which should have lightened have added a weight to the
curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which
money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates
new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it
engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and
the good.
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