CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 387 



road, whose track lies across rivulets of tears and through a sea of blood ? 

 Can we discern in political history any steady progress effected by the 

 play of the forces which constitute its subject-matter ? Do kings grow 

 wiser, or peoples more sober-minded ? On the contrary, does not the 

 lesson taught by history seem to be this, that history teaches no lesson ? 

 Till modern times, did humanity steadily and consecutively advance from 

 step to step in liberty, morality, power, art, well-being, and science ? 

 Does not the history of which we speak present to our view rather a 

 labor of Sisyphus, and does not the very conception of different periods 

 of civilization imply the downfall of those civilizations ? 



Alas ! we know only too well that this kind of history was for a long- 

 time the only one known to man ; and for the mass of people it will 

 continue to be the only one. The mighty game of chance, played for 

 stakes the value of which is known of all men, and the strife of passions 

 it calls forth this drama, whereof man himself is at once the poet and 

 the performer, irresistibly attracts the ingenuous mind, and is full of the 

 profoundest lessons, however little they may be regarded. 



But contemplate for a moment infinite space strewed with nebulae 

 in the chaotic state, with star-clusters and solar systems. Imagine, as 

 an invisible point in this infinity, our own sun as it speeds on into un- 

 known regions of the heavens, surrounded by its planets, each one re- 

 volving in its own proper orbit Jupiter, the giant-planet, with his moons, 

 and Saturn with his rings. Again, imagine our earth, a point in this 

 system, shooting through universal space at the rate of a falling star, 

 and rotating on its axis from morning to night, from night to morning 

 " mountain and sea borne along in the ever-rapid course of the spheres." 

 Descend, in imagination, into its fiery interior, and learn the great out- 

 lines of its history. After ages innumerable, the flood of molten lava 

 at its surface became sufficiently cooled to admit of the existence of 

 life ; organisms succeeded one another till, at length, the history of our 

 own race begins in the twilight of fable, now, however, fllumined by the 

 discoveries of prehistoric research. 



We will call this mode of looking at terrestrial phenomena, opposed 

 as it is to the anthropocentric point of view, the Archimedean perspec- 

 tive, because thereby we in thought take a standpoint beyond the earth, 

 just as Archimedes desired to have a locus standi outside the earth, in 

 order to move it. 



How lowly and insignificant do earthly things appear when thus 

 contemplated ! How petty now seem all those occurrences which we 

 are wont to regard as so weighty, that we comprehend them under the 

 high-sounding name of " universal history," whereas, in truth, one half 

 of them belong to the history of the wars, and the other half to the his- 

 tory of the hallucinations of only a few civilized nations ! How vain 

 and foolish are wars for a patch of land or for blood-stained laurels ! In 

 presence of the sublime spectacle of the universe, may we not exhort to 

 reconciliation and harmony the race of man, ever wrangling about piti- 



