CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNIVERSE. 113 



nally deposited with men, but gradually slumbered and was 

 forgotten ; the knowledge of it returns like a recollection." 

 We willingly leave it undecided whether the nations which 

 we now call savage are all in a condition of original natural 

 rudeness, or whether, as the structure of their languages 

 often leads us to conjecture, many of them are not rather to 

 be regarded as tribes having lapsed into a savage state, 

 fragments remaining from the wreck of a civilisation which 

 was early lost. Closer communication with these so-called 

 children of nature discloses nothing of that superior know- 

 ledge of terrestrial forces, which the love of the marvellous 

 has sometimes chosen to ascribe to rude nations. There 

 rises, indeed, in the bosom of the savage a vague and 

 awful feeling of the unity of natural forces ; but such a 

 feeling has nothing in common with the endeavours to 

 embrace intellectually the connection of phenomena. True 

 cosmical views are the results of observation and ideal com- 

 bination; they are the fruit of long-continued contact 

 between the mind of man and the external world. INFor are 

 they the work of a single people ; in their formation, mutual 

 communication is required, and great if not general inter- 

 course between various nations. 



As in the considerations on the reflex action of the external 

 world on the imaginative faculties, which formed the first 

 portion of the present volume, I gathered, from the general 

 history of literature, that which relates to the expression of 

 a vivid feeling of nature, so in the " history of the contem- 

 plation of the universe," I select, from the history of general 

 intellectual cultivation, that which marks progress in the 

 recognition of a natural whole. Both these portions, 

 not detached arbitrarily, but according to determinate 



