78 MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS n 



every man born into the world. Most of us, 

 shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which 

 beset the seeker after original answers to these 

 riddles, are contented to ignore them altogether, 

 or to smother the investigating spirit under the 

 feather-bed of respected and respectable tradition. 

 But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, 

 blessed with that constructive genius, which can 

 only build on a secure foundation, or cursed with 

 the spirit of mere scepticism, are unable to follow 

 in the well-worn and comfortable 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 atheism which denies the existence of any 

 orderly progress and governance of things: the 

 men of genius propound solutions which grow 

 into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, 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, in- 

 variably asserted by -the followers of its pro- 

 pounder, if not by himself, 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 



