232 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



every age a certain portion of our recorded and traditional 

 knowledge, not being continually suggested by the pursuits 

 and inquiries with which mankind are at that time engrossed, 

 should fall asleep, as it were, and fade from the memory. 

 It would be in danger of being totally lost, if the proposi 

 tions or formulas, the results of the previous experience, did 

 not remain, as forms of words it may be, but of words that 

 once really conveyed, and are still supposed to convey, a 

 meaning : which meaning, though suspended, may be histori 

 cally traced, and when suggested, may be recognised by minds 

 of the necessary endowments as being still matter of fact, or 

 truth. While the formulas remain, the meaning may at any 

 time revive ; and as on the one hand the formulas progres 

 sively lose the meaning they were intended to convey, so, 

 on the other, when this forgetfulness has reached its height 

 and begun to produce obvious consequences, minds arise 

 which from the contemplation of the formulas rediscover the 

 truth, when truth it was, which was contained in them, and 

 announce it again to mankind, not as a discovery, but as the 

 meaning of that which they have been taught, and still profess 

 to believe. 



Thus there is a perpetual oscillation in spiritual truths, 

 and in spiritual doctrines of any significance, even when 

 not truths. Their meaning is almost always in a process 

 either of being lost or of being recovered. Whoever has 

 attended to the history of the more serious convictions 

 of mankind of the opinions by which the general conduct 

 of their lives is, or as they conceive ought to be, more 

 especially regulated is aware that even when recognising 

 verbally the same doctrines, they attach to them at different 

 periods a greater or a less quantity, and even a different 

 kind, of meaning. The words in their original acceptation 

 connoted, and the propositions expressed, a complication of 

 outward facts and inward feelings, to different portions of 

 which the general mind is more particularly alive in different 

 generations of mankind. To common minds, only that portion 

 of the meaning is in each generation suggested, of which that 

 generation possesses the counterpart in its own habitual expe- 



