lO PRIMEVAL MAN. 



his own character and conduct before God — 

 " I do not exercise myself in tilings too high 

 for me." On the other hand, we must remem- 

 ber that in nothing has the human race been 

 more liable to the delusions of superstition 

 than in the conception of the matters which 

 were to be held, or were not to be held, as 

 forbidden to investigation. Those physical 

 laws of nature which are now so familiar to 

 us as the peculiar field of observation and 

 discovery — a field on which the march of in- 

 tellect has been so rapid and so triumphant — 

 were once held by the early Greek philo- 

 sophers as belonging to the most secret things 

 of God. They thought, perhaps not un- 

 naturally, that a region which lay, or seemed 

 to lie, so much nearer to themselves, even 



