It is written, "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be
increased." Surely the plain rule is, Let each considerate person have his
way, and see what it will lead to. For not this man and that man, but all
men make up mankind, and their united tasks the task of mankind. How often
have we seen some such adventurous, and perhaps much-censured wanderer
light on some out-lying, neglected, yet vitally momentous province; the
hidden treasures of which he first discovered, and kept proclaiming till
the general eye and effort were directed thither, and the conquest was
completed;--thereby, in these his seemingly so aimless rambles, planting
new standards, founding new habitable colonies, in the immeasurable
circumambient realm of Nothingness and Night! Wise man was he who
counselled that Speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly
towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and
howsoever it listed.


Perhaps it is proof of the stunted condition in which pure Science,
especially pure moral Science, languishes among us English; and how our
mercantile greatness, and invaluable Constitution, impressing a political
or other immediately practical tendency on all English culture and
endeavor, cramps the free flight of Thought,--that this, not Philosophy of
Clothes, but recognition even that we have no such Philosophy, stands here
for the first time published in our language. What English intellect could
have chosen such a topic, or by chance stumbled on it? But for that same
unshackled, and even sequestered condition of the German Learned, which
permits and induces them to fish in all manner of waters, with all manner
of nets, it seems probable enough, this abtruse Inquiry might, in spite of
the results it leads to, have continued dormant for indefinite periods.
The Editor of these sheets, though otherwise boasting himself a man of
confirmed speculative habits, and perhaps discursive enough, is free to