272 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION OP 



period of the Conquista, (a period when men's heads were 

 dizzy with strenuous efforts, heroic achievements, deeds of 

 violence, and discoveries by sea and land), notwithstanding 

 the entire absence of political freedom, many circumstances 

 conspired to favour individual development, and to cause 

 some more highly gifted minds to attain to much that was 

 noble. They err who regard the Conquistadores as led only 

 by a thirst for gold, or even exclusively by religious 

 fanaticism. Dangers always exalt the poetry of life ; and 

 moreover, the powerful age which we here seek to depict in 

 regard to its influence on the development of cosmical ideas, 

 gave to all enterprizes, as well as to the impressions of nature 

 offered by distant voyages, the charm of novelty and surprise, 

 which begins to be wanting to our present more learned age in 

 the many regions of the earth which are now open to us. It 

 was not only a hemisphere, but almost two-thirds of the 

 surface of the globe, which was then still an unknown 

 and unexplored world; as unseen as that half of the 

 moon's disk which the laws of gravitation withdraw for 

 ever from the view of the inhabitants of the earth. Our 

 more deeply investigating age finds, in the increasing 

 riches of ideas, a compensation for the lessening of that 

 surprise, which the novelty of great and imposing natural 

 phenomena once called forth; but this is a compensation 

 not to the multitude, but to the small number of physicists 

 acquainted with the state of science, and to them it is 

 ample. To them the increasing insight into the silent 

 operation of the powers of nature; whether in electro- 

 magnetism, or in the polarisation of light, in the influence 

 of diathermal substances, or in the physiological phenomena 

 of living organised beings, offers a world of wonders 



