The Progress of the Race 
ful 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 
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