58 
and governance of things: the men of genius propound solu- 
tions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, 
or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it 
asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch. 
Each such answer to the great question, invariably as- 
serted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, 
to be complete and final, remains in high authority and 
esteem, it may be for one century, or it may be for twenty : 
but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been a 
mere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on ac- 
count of the ignorance of those by whom if was accepted, 
and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge 
of their successors. 
In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the 
life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the 
butterfly ; but the comparison may be more just as well as 
more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress 
of the race. History shows that the human mind, fed by con- 
stant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for 
its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in 
new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at in- 
tervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another, itself 
but temporary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be 
terribly distant, but every moult is astep gained, and of such 
there have been many. 
Since the revival of learning, whereby the Western races 
of Europe were enabled to enter upon that progress towards 
true knowledge, which was commenced by the philosophers of 
Greece, but was almost arrested in subsequent long ages of in- 
tellectual stagnation, or, at most, gyration, the human larva has 
been feeding vigorously, and moulting in proportion. A skin 
of some dimension was cast in the 16th century, and another 
towards the end of the 18th, while, within the last fifty years, 
the extraordinary growth of every department of physical 
science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and 
stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent. 
% 
