116 COSMOS. 



These central points ivoluntarily remind us of the hirgest 

 among the sparkling stars of the firmament, these eternal suns 

 in the regions of space, the intensity of whose brightness we 

 certainly know, although it is only in the case of a few that 

 we have been able to arrive at any certain knowledge regard- 

 ing the relative distances which separate them from our planet. 



The hypothesis regarding the physical knowledge supposed 

 to have been revealed to the primitive races of men — the nat- 

 ural philosophy ascribed to savage nations, and since obscured 

 by civilization — belongs to a sphere of science, or; rather, of be- 

 lief, which is foreign to the object of the present work. We 

 find this belief deeply rooted in the most ancient Indian doc- 

 trine of Krischna.=^ " Truth was originally implanted in man- 

 kind, but, having been suffered gradually to slumber, it was 

 finally forgotten, knowledge returning to us since that period 

 as a recollection." We will not attempt to decide the ques- 

 tion whether the races, which we at present term savage, are 

 all in a condition of original wildness, or whether, as the struc- 

 ture of their languages often allows of our conjecturing, many 

 among them may not be tribes that have degenerated into a 

 wild state, remaining as the scattered fragments saved from 

 the wreck of a civilization that was early lost. A more inti- 

 mate acquaintance with these so-called children of nature 

 reveals no traces of that superiority of knowledge regarding 

 terrestrial forces which a love of the marvelous has led men 

 to ascribe to these rude nations. A vague and terror-stricken 

 feeling of the unity of natural forces is no doubt awakened in 

 the breast of the savage, but such a feeling has nothing in 

 common with the attempt to prove, by the power of thought, 

 the connection that exists among all phenomena. True cos- 

 mical views are the result of observation and ideal combina- 

 tion, and of a long-continued communion with the external 

 world ; nor are they a work of a single people, but the fruits 

 yielded by reciprocal communication, and by a great, if not 

 general, intercourse between different nations. 



As, in the considerations on the reflection of the external 

 world on the powers of the imagination at the beginning of 

 this section of the present work, I selected from the general 

 history of literature examples illustrative of the expression of 

 an animated feeling for nature, so, in the history of the con- 

 temjjLation of the universe, I would likewise bring forward 

 from the general history of civilization whatever may serve to 



* Wilheloi vou Humboldt, Uehcr eine Episode des Maha-Bharata, in 

 his Gesammelte Werke, bd. i., s. 73. 



