that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a
freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought,
he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what
at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.
Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to
all that is or can be done, for this is the only and
sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its
genius is illustrated by the entire series of days.
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his
history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit
goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,
every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in
appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to
the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the
mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but
one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and
Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded
already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp,
kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the
application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of
history is in one man, it is all to be explained from
individual experience. There is a relation between the
hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the