I885.J 
Progress of Thought. 33 c 
the middle of his arch ; and though it may be fanciful, I 
think the Byzantium horse-shoe arch shows that the archi- 
tect’s eye looked at it from below, above him. Yet he was 
not wholly excluded from the space by reason of the lower 
opening. Of course they would not have said such were 
their conceptions, but such appears to me to be their latent 
origin, and from this we can draw conclusions as to their 
mental train of idea. May not the bounding arch represent 
a circular heaven ? where was it in the temples of the ancient 
monarchies ? The straight line preceded the circle. Man 
considered the plain before he looked up to the sky. 
From these reflections naturally arises the question, look- 
ing at thought as seen from its visible exhibitions, what 
progress have we made ? Are we not at exactly the stage 
of development as the paltry Republics of the Peloponnesian 
peninsula and the Hellenian mainland ? It is admitted they 
are not excelled. Are we compelled to acknowledge a sort 
ot separate creation ” for the Aryan, whose mental capa- 
city is constant and equal through all ages, and only varies 
as a result of accumulative experience ? I can’t answer 
this off hand, but reply by another incidence in the world’s 
history, viz., the complete development of the Jewish 
religion, on which Christ put the headstone, when he said 
Moses had insisted on an eye for eye, but He bid them offer 
the other cheek to the smiter. It is needless to repeat the 
change then in one race, but it did occur ; and ordinances 
first issued as the commandments are now moral certainties. 
There is one thing noteworthy, I think, in modern every- 
day writing, that is its crowdedness. The mind would ever 
seem to be crowding in with fresh ideas, edgeway as it were ; 
a whole string of words will intervene between a proposition 
and a verb, a sentence three quarters told is interrupted by 
an explanation, beatitude, or otherwise even longer than 
the sentence itself, and so forth. ExaCtly so is the modern 
mind and modern architecture. I have seen somewhere 
that Herodotus, the early historian of Greece, ran on in his 
writings almost entirely without a full stop. Modern ex- 
pression is always seeking too many at once. I think it was 
Hamilton who made it out that the human mind was capable 
of conceiving its distant ideas at one time ; but we are im- 
proving on that, with a necessary consequence of confusion ; 
if, however, we devote ourselves to one idea, is not the extra 
power of the modern mind made apparent by our achieve- 
ments ? If we only “ kept it up ” we must grow wiser. 
