CONCLUSION 



IF we would discover how a watercourse is formed, from the 

 very first bog-streams up in the mountain, we must follow a 

 multitude of tiny rills, receiving one fresh stream after another 

 from every side, running together into burns, which grow and 

 grow and form little rivers, till we come to the end of the wooded 

 hillside and are suddenly face to face with the great river in the 

 valley below. 



A similar task confronts him who endeavors to explore 

 the first trickling rivulets of human knowledge; he must 

 trace all the minute, uncertain, often elusive beginnings, 

 follow the diversity of tributaries from all parts of the earth, 

 and show how the mass of knowledge increases constantly 

 from age to age, sometimes reposing in long stretches of dead 

 water, half choked with peat and rushes, at other times plunging 

 onward in foaming rapids. And then he, too, is rewarded; the 

 stream grows broader and broader, until he stands beside the navi- 

 gable river. 



But a simile never covers the whole case. The latter task is 

 rendered not only wider, but incomparably more difficult, by the 

 fact that the brooks and rivers whose courses are to be followed 

 are even more intricate and scarcely ever flow in an open stream. 

 True knowledge is so seldom undiluted; as a rule it is suffused 

 with myths and dogmatic conceptions, often to such a degree that 

 it becomes entirely lost, and something new seems to have arisen 

 in its place. 



379 



