234 NATURE AND MAN. 



of it as his most glorious prize, will be constantly on the watch for 

 opportunities of improving his fabric of knowledge, and of per- 

 fecting its furniture of beliefs. Now in doing this, he will find 

 that as his fabric is altered (or rather, alters itself), his furniture 

 must be changed in accordance with it ; for the enlargement of 

 one of his apartments may enable him to give place to some 

 article which he was formerly obliged to reject, whilst the reduc- 

 tion of another may crowd out the fittings which were once 

 most perfectly suited to it. Every one who has gone through a 

 sufficiently long course of intellectual experiences, and has been 

 accustomed to reflect upon them, must be conscious that this has 

 often occurred to himself. He is surprised, on turning over the 

 records of his earlier beHefs, to find how many of them he would 

 now absolutely reject ; not because they have been disproved by 

 additional evidence, but because he has himself grown out of them. 

 And it is, further, by the use of the power which every man 

 possesses of enlarging^ as well as improving, his fabric of thought, 

 by applying himself to the acquirement of new knowledge, that 

 he gains a vastly increased capacity for the reception of a nobler 

 and grander order of beliefs, such as he would have previously 

 thought it impossible t*liat he could ever come to possess. Sup- 

 pose an American professor to have come over, a dozen years 

 ago, to announce to the scientific public of Europe, that he had 

 devised and perfected a method by which he was enabled to 

 recognize in the incandescent atmosphere of the sun at least 

 seventeen of the component elements of our own globe ; that he 

 had discovered the most notable of these to be hydrogen, which, 

 heated to redness, forms a glowing envelope ordinarily at least 

 five thousand miles thick, whence fiery tongues are shot forth 

 from time to time, sometimes to the height of fifty thousand miles 

 in a few minutes, their disappearance being often as rapid as their 

 projection ; and that he had ascertained the sun-spots to be the 

 centres of circular storms, sometimes revolving at the rate of one 

 hundred and twenty miles per second, which are set in motion by 

 a downward rush of metallic vapours, dependent on a local cooling 

 that can only be measured by thousands of degrees ; what would 

 have been our mental attitude? These propositions would, to 

 most of us, whether scientific or unscientific, have seemed so com- 



