The Progress of the Race 



fill purpose by restoring our courage and 

 stimulating research in a new direction. 

 It might at the first glance seem wiser, 

 perhaps, instead of advancing these in- 

 genious suppositions, simply to say the 

 profound truth, which is that we do not 

 know. But this truth could only be help- 

 ful were it written that we never shall 

 know. In the meanwhile it would induce 

 a state of stagnation within us more per- 

 nicious than the most vexatious illusions. 

 We are so constituted that nothing takes 

 us further or leads us higher than the 

 leaps made by our errors. In point of 

 fact we owe the little we have learned to 

 hypotheses that were always hazardous 

 and often absurd, and, as a general rule, 

 less discreet than they are to-day. They 

 were unwise, perhaps, but they kept alive 

 the ardour for research. To the traveller, 

 shivering with cold, who reaches the hu- 

 man Hostelry, it matters little whether he 



