Moral Philosophies [pp. 402-410]

MORAL PHILOSOPHIES.
still for a time stood poised in the perfect balance of his character and the symmetrical proportions of his nature, yet the great
props of his life had been taken away. And so it happened that
stirred by some cold, mysterious breath of the night, with the
growth and foliage of his life all heavy with the dew of HIeavenly cares, he tottered and fell-fell with perhaps one last loving
pang for the cruel blow with which lis sudden and resounding
fall was to crash upon the trembling hearts of churches and
States and friends and family.
And thus he lay in the majesty of death; and little children
and pure women, young men and old, the meek and the gentle,
the proud and the lowly, the rich and the poor, the great and
the wise, bishops, priests, soldiers, scholars and statesmen, came
to mourn around the bier of noble Georgia's dead Bishop.
Fortuna son mutat genus was the rallying cry of the ancient
worthies; and amidst the social change, private ruin and political disaster which surround them, let those who bear the unsullied name of the saintly knight, who, in full armor, has thus
fallen on sleep, and names like his, remember, let every true
Southern heart still remember —Fortuna non mutat genuts.
ART. X. —MORAL PIIILOSOPIIJES.
1. Humanics.-By J. Wharton Collins, Esq., of Louisiana.
2. The Harmony of Creation.-By W. Archer Cocke, of Florida.
WE do not know what the experience of other authors has
been, but we have always found it necessary to invent a new
word or phrase when we attempted to expound a new theory,
thought, or idea. Instead of suspecting an author of a love for
pedantic display, and of being repelled from reading his book,
because he coins a term to express and define its subject, we
usually consider it as prima facie evidence, that his subject is a
inew one, for which our existing vocabulary furnishes no sufficiently accurate terminology. With these prepossessions we
took up Mr. Collins' book on " Humanics," and have not been
disappointed in its perusal. "Humanics," in the breadth, precision and analytical accuracy and exhaustiveness with which he
has treated a new thought, a new subject, and one which not
only justified, but necessitated the coinage of a new term. It is
a subject, too, of the profoundest interest, for "the proper study
of mankind is man." Not merely the study of his moral nature,
as Pope suggests in this quotation, but of his vegetable, his
animal, his intellectual, his individual, his gregarious or social,
and his religious nature. It is in this latter sense that Mr. Collins adopts these words of Pope as the motto of his work. No
word or phrase in the English language could accurately express
and define a programme so broad, and none could be invented
so expressive and appropriate as "Humanics."
402