1865.] 143 [Lesley. 



S3. So wide a generalization of facts from all departments of his- 

 tory in the past, and human life in the present, centred at so small a 

 group as that which has been described above, under the name of 

 the arkite symbol of the mountain, ship, and water, will necessarily 

 incur the charge of one-sidedness. The theory will be said to attempt 

 too much, to run itself into the ground, to break down with its own 

 weight. It will find arrayed against itself other theories of primaeval 

 history, laboriously invented by the best thinkers of the last hundred 

 years, each claiming to explain the rise and development of human 

 thought and culture, as well as most of the anomalous and eccentric, 

 fantastic and absurd, misapplications of men's views of the super- 

 natural, and of nature. Of no part of science is it a truer saying 

 than of this, that no theory can be true that does not accept, ally, 

 and illustrate, all that is true in all other theories^ embodyingv,^heir 

 generalizations within its own, and diifering from them only in the 

 superior expansiveness (rf its field of vision. Modern geology is 

 neither Huttonism nor Wernerism, but an eclectic combination of 

 both. Sociology, as now best taught, recognizes the justness of every 

 form of government in its natural place. The science of physics is 

 a compound precipitate from the rel-ation of the most prosy parts of 

 materialistic natural-history, and the finest transcendental or meta- 

 physical notions respecting essence, and the mysterious forces of the 

 entire universe. Even theology is being stimulated from its sleep of 

 ages by stimulants administered by unbelieving savans. Isolation is 

 no longer possible for the investigator; and his theories must be in 

 good society, or be tabooed. 



34. Archasology has been based exclusively on Astrology by some 

 of its best writers. Undoubtedly there is a department of astronomi- 

 cal archaeology; and the genius and learning displayed in such a 

 master-piece as Dupuis' great work were far from being thrown away. 

 On the contrary, it is as much a cabinet of new-discovered facts and 

 truths, as Boucher des Perthes' Celtic Remains, or Tyndall's Lectures 

 on Heat. But it does not follow from all the wonderful coincidences 

 between mythologies and the phenomena of the sky, that the abori- 

 ginal mythology was astronomical. Man's eyes were early dazzled 

 by the light of the sun, and his heart melted by the beauty of the 

 moon; but an earlier worship may have existed for his soul, and cen- 

 turies of intellectual development may have been needed before the 

 order of the stars could take so strong a hold upon his imagination, 

 as to subjugate his reverence, and systematize his hopes and fears 

 into the Mithraic and Sab^ean forms. Some wider synthesis must in- 



