comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and
unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of their
own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to
be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any
orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound
solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or
veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take
the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.

Each such answer to the great question, invariably asserted by the
followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and
final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century,
or it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to
have been a mere approximation to the truth--tolerable chiefly on
account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly
intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.

In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and
the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the
comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former
term we take the mental progress of the race. History shows that the
human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows
too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to
appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at
intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another, itself but
temporary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be terribly distant,
but every moult is a step gained, and of such there have been many.

Since the revival of learning, whereby the Western races of Europe were
enabled to enter upon that progress towards true knowledge, which was