Admis enfin, aurai-jo alors,
Pour tout esprit, l'esprit de corps?
Il rend le bon sens, quoi qu'on dise,
Solidaire de la sottise;
Mais, dans votes societe,
L'esprit de corps, c'est la gaite.
Cet esprit la regne sans tyrannie.
Non, non, ce n'est point comme a l'Academie;
Ce n'est point comme a l'Acadenie.

Asylums of common-place, he hints, academies must ever be. But that
sentence is too harsh; the true one is--the academies are asylums of
the ideas and the tastes of the last age. 'By the time,' I have
heard a most eminent man of science observe. 'by the time a man of
science attains eminence on any subject, he becomes a nuisance upon
it, because he is sure to retain errors which were in vogue when he
was young, but which the new race have refuted.' These are the sort
of ideas which find their home in academies, and out of their
dignified windows pooh-pooh new things. I may seem to have wandered
far from early society, but I have not wandered. The true scientific
method is to explain the past by the present--what we see by what we
do not see. We can only comprehend why so many nations have not
varied, when we see how hateful variation is; how everybody turns
against it; how not only the conservatives of speculation try to
root it out, but the very innovators invent most rigid machines for
crushing the 'monstrosities and anomalies'--the new forms, out of
which, by competition and trial, the best is to be selected for the
future. The point I am bringing out is simple:--one most important
pre-requisite of a prevailing nation is that it should have passed
out of the first stage of civilisation into the second stage--out of