72 THE RELATIONS OF MAN 



on a secure foundation, or cursed with the mere spirit of 

 scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and com- 

 fortable 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 athe- 

 ism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and 

 governance of things : the men of genius propound solu- 

 tions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philoso- 

 phy, 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 him- 

 self, 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 



