IS80.J °b»i [JbQSley. 



lous were it made in the city of the Pharaohs, or the city 

 of the Caesars, or at Aix la Ghapelle, or almost anywhere ex- 

 cept in the city of William Penn. 



Let ns suppose,- however, that we were (as a Society, I 

 mean) one thousand years old instead of one hundred. What 

 real difference would it make ? We should be invested per- 

 haps with more vanity, but with not a whit more faculty : 

 nor be a whit less responsible to our own exertions for prac 

 tically translating pride into power. 



I take it that perhaps the crowning beauty of human history 

 lies in the essential identity of mankind of all ages. So far as 

 thought is concerned there is nothing new and nothing old. 

 The ancients proposed the same problems to themselves that 

 we do ; wondered at Nature as heartily and helplessly as we 

 do ; questioned the gods in precisely the same spirit (though 

 by means of different apparatus) in which we question the 

 forces ; found the same excitement in the struggle tor exist- 

 ence, and the same repose in old age. Temperance, justice 

 and family love were then as now the acknowledged palladia 

 of society ; while the older sages stood upon the same plat- 

 form of philosophical indifference to circumstances, and con- 

 fidence in the resources of a free will for all purposes of 

 offence and defence against evil, from which the philosophi- 

 cal minds of our nineteenth century now preach tolerance 

 for opposition and trust in the order of events. 



Neither is the difference greater between climes and races 

 than it is between generations and ages. There have been 

 Turanian as well as Aryan philosophers; and their scriptures 

 arc so like in spirit that they might have been written in 

 the same alphabet. 



On the other hand : while God has made thus of one 

 blood all the dwellers upon earth, the diversities of individual 



THOC. AMEE. PHILOS. SOC. XVIII. IOC. o\V. PIUNTED MAY 25, 1880. 



