5 
which it costs him to regain his footing'—if, indeed, he shall ever regain it at all— 
would, with proper heed to his steps, have carried him far onward upon his jour¬ 
ney. 
Besides, those “ stars” of genius follow the law of all other stars, by being con¬ 
spicuous only in the dark, and more conspicuous the more profound the obscurity is, 
and the more vacant the space athwart which they are seen. In the mighty dark¬ 
ness of those ages, during which the combined mischief of reckless war, and sense¬ 
less superstition, had well-nigh banished science from the earth, a single scintilla¬ 
tion, and that too of some false light—of some ignis fatuus of the polluted air— 
was sufficient to constitute a star of the first magnitude, after which the benighted 
children of men wondered and worshipped ; and this they were prone to endow 
with “ airs from heaven” or “ blasts from hell,” upon as slender grounds as those 
which called forth their wonder and their worship. But as the dawn of true 
knowledge broke, and the sun of science neared the horizon, the stars in that part 
waxed dim and disappeared; and when this glorious morning to the human mind 
had so far advanced as to shew, as it were, to the great body of the people upon 
the earth the objects immediately around them, in their true colours, so that each 
man might observe with his own senses, and judge with his own understanding, 
those stars of the darkness of intellectual night vanished away, as is the case with 
their namesakes of the natural sky. 
We do not say that the full light of the sun of knowledge has yet broken upon 
even the most lofty pinnacles of human nature ; but we do say that the morning 
dawn is both broad and glorious ; so that any one who has eyes to see, and will 
use them, may fully understand everything which comes within the range of his 
observation, and within the legitimate pale of human philosophy. And it is pre¬ 
cisely because such is the case-—because the light of science is general, and sets 
off. the qualities and the nature of things by their coincidencies and their contrasts, 
it has become so necessary thoroughly to understand the general nature of this 
light, before we proceed to the details of those subjects which it reveals to us. 
The illustrations which we may draw from this analogy of the light of Nature, 
and of the light of Science, especially of the science of Nature, are very numerous, 
and they are equally apt and striking. It is the light itself which reveals to us 
the forms of things, and which paints them with all their varied colours. In the 
blackness of darkness, the most lovely flower, or the richest parterre, is a mere 
blank; and if we examine objects by means of a decomposed light, or through a 
tainted or coloured medium, the false colour of the light, or the taint of the me¬ 
dium, disguises all that we see ; just as looking through a red glass makes the 
whole landscape red; or as the murky air, by turning aside all the more refrangi¬ 
ble colours of the solar beam, makes the cloud, and even the sun itself, seem 
murky. Those matters were not understood until men knew how to divide 
the white light of the sun into its component shades. But when once this was 
