to its highest object, theology, would be useless if not wrong in the
eyes of a Mussulman, who had already his simple and sharply-defined
creed on all matters relating to the unseen world. With him metaphysic
was a study altogether divorced from man's higher life and aspirations.
So also were physics. What need had he of Cosmogonies? what need to
trace the relations between man and the universe, or the universe and
its Maker? He had his definite material Elysium and Tartarus, as the
only ultimate relation between man and the universe; his dogma of an
absolute fiat, creating arbitrary and once for all, as the only relation
between the universe and its Maker: and further it was not lawful to
speculate. The idea which I believe unites both physic and metaphysic
with man's highest inspirations and widest speculations--the Alexandria
idea of the Logos, of the Deity working in time and space by successive
thoughts--he had not heard of; for it was dead, as I have said, in
Alexandria itself; and if he had heard of it, he would have spurned it
as detracting from the absoluteness of that abysmal one Being, of whom
he so nobly yet so partially bore witness. So it was to be; doubtless
it was right that it should be so. Man's eye is too narrow to see a
whole truth, his brain too weak to carry a whole truth. Better for him,
and better for the world, is perhaps the method on which man has been
educated in every age, by which to each school, or party, or nation, is
given some one great truth, which they are to work out to its highest
development, to exemplify in actual life, leaving some happier age--
perhaps, alas! only some future state--to reconcile that too favoured
dogma with other truths which lie beside it, and without which it is
always incomplete, and sometimes altogether barren.

But such schools of science, founded on such a ground as this, on the
mere instinct of curiosity, had little chance of originality or
vitality. All the great schools of the world, the elder Greek