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attempted to reach bounds beyond the limits of our minds to 
analyze, and that such early dreams, accounted as vain fancies 
by some, have been received as true and adopted as facts by 
the succeeding generation, ever subject, however, to change 
by the progress or diffusion of knowledge. 
The physical laws of nature, — now so familiar even to school- 
boys, that the law of gravitation which immortalized the name 
of Newton is now so universally understood that he that runs 
may read, and is regularly explained in every popular assembly 
in small towns throughout the country, — were held by the early 
Greek philosophers as restricted to the profoundest secrets of 
God, which were beyond their scope ; while they preferred to 
engage themselves in studying the phenomena of their own 
mentality as more comprehensible by their understanding. 
Thus they plunged at once into all the many refinements of 
metaphysics, from which it is devoutly to be wished that the 
human mind might at no very distant date be slightly relieved 
by its becoming more amenable to the dictates of common 
sense. 
The pursuit of speculations was at first carried on by the 
restless thirst for knowledge as to the nature of matter and 
its constituent properties ; the time of man's first appearance 
on the globe ; his primary condition ; his distribution ; the 
localities where he rose from ; and the generations which 
followed him, approximating the utmost limits of our powers 
to analyze. Still, the mere appearance of the limit need not 
deter us, because we well know that “ whatever is inaccessible 
to reason is strictly interdicted to research/' as Mr. Lewes 
says. This is reproducing the old priestcraft interdicts, deter- 
mining what is inaccessible to reason. The priests of this new 
philosophy tell us, if all proofs of mind are to be received as 
evidences of purpose and conceptions of plan and design in 
the history of creation, it merely indicates the product of the 
weakness of human intellect. 
In spite of all these attempts arbitrarily to restrict the 
bounds of knowledge, we can never really know its limit 
until the way of access has been fairly tried. The interests 
of truth demand the resistance of any interdict against research, 
whatever school may have presumed to raise it, evidently 
from feeling a dread of free inquiry. On these principles 
such subjects are accessible to research as the age of man's 
appearance and his condition during the pre- Sabbatic period, 
as well as the contemporary history since the creation of 
Adam and Eve in Paradise, the “ isli " and “ isha " indicating 
the spiritual form in which they were at first created, prior to 
the events recorded in the third chapter of Genesis, where 
