satisfies himself,--the main point.

Students of metaphysics have of late years defined the abuse of
their science as "the morphology of common opinion." Contemporary
investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with
introspection; their labors have become merely
physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the
study of averages. For, says La Rochefoucauld, _Il est plus aise
de connoitre l'homme en general que de connoitre un homme en
particulier_; and on so wide a subject all views must be
one-sided.

But this is not the fashion of Easterns. They have still to treat
great questions _ex analogia universi_, instead of _ex analogia
hominis_. They must learn the basis of sociology, the philosophic
conviction that mankind should be studied, not as a congeries of
individuals, but as an organic whole. Hence the _Zeitgeist_, or
historical evolution of the collective consciousness of the age,
despises the obsolete opinion that Society, the State, is bound
by the same moral duties as the simple citizen. Hence, too, it
holds that the "spirit of man, being of equal and uniform
substance, doth usually suppose and feign in nature a greater
equality and uniformity than is in Truth."

Christianity and Islamism have been on their trial for the last
eighteen and twelve centuries. They have been ardent in
proselytizing, yet they embrace only one-tenth and one-twentieth
of the human race. Haji Abdu would account for the tardy and
unsatisfactory progress of what their votaries call "pure
truths," by the innate imperfections of the same. Both propose a