Modern Agriculture [pp. 660-667]

MODERN AGRICULTURE.
His system is founded on millions of facts, observed by hundreds of thousands of wise men for two thousand years past.
He is more doubtful, more modest, less dogmatical, than our
old woman, because he is wiser than she.
Every well-to-do farmer, with his walking cane, thick gloves,
and broad-brimmed hat, who has succeeded in making a dozen
good crops, will, merely from his own observation and experience, most oracularly lay down for you the whole theory and
practice of agriculture-for all times, all seasons, all soils, all
crops, and all climates. He, too, is a philosopher, a Sir Oracle,
with none of the infirmities of a Solomon, or a Newton, who
grew less confident as they grew more learned; and who, at
last, viewing at a distance the mighty field of unexplored
knowledge before them, confessed in despair they knew nothing. Our-farmer has no such weaknesses: he is sure he knows
everything on every subject; and his success in moneymaking inclines half his neighbors to the same opinion.
Give us Baron Von Liebig's philosophy in preference, which
deduces its theories from the learning and experience of two
thousand years past. The latter will often be wrong; the
former always wrong, because the exact facts on which his
theory is founded will never recur: —the same field, with the
same elements of soil, and with the same seasons and the same
crops, will never be in cultivation again.
The doctor who, without experience of his own, practises
merely from the book, will kill half his patients. The farmer
who relies merely on book knowledge will lose his crops. The
moralist who attempts to go like the bear straight-forward
through life, under the guidance of moral rules, deduced from
books on ethics, regardless of attending circumstances, will be
in continual collision with his fellow-men; and like another
"Philosopher Square," will find that his unbending moral rules
unfit him for society, and involve him in unintentional wrongd(loing. Each man must acquire his own experience, and can
neither beg, buy, nor borrow it from others. This self-experience is, however, a far safer guide when combined with book
knowledge, than when aided only by the crude theories of the
practical, but ignorant.
From what precedes we deduce a conclusion of vast importance to mankind, and one which we believe is new-to wit:
"That no philosophical system of morals, of medicine, or of
agriculture can be true, because all the facts from which a
true theory must be deduced can never be known to man.
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