remark sometimes, is a
symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished;
that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed.

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of
_music_; be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were
by their Orpheus of old. Or failing this rhythmic _musical_ way, how
good were it could we get so much as into the _equable_ way; I mean,
if _peaceable_ Priests, reforming from day to day, would always
suffice us! But it is not so; even this latter has not yet been
realised. Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a
needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: the
very things that were once indispensable furtherances become
obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,--a
business often of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, surely,
how a Theorem or spiritual Representation, so we may call it, which
once took in the whole Universe, and was completely satisfactory in
all parts of it to the highly-discursive acute intellect of Dante, one
of the greatest in the world,--had in the course of another century
become dubitable to common intellects; become deniable; and is now, to
every one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete as Odin's Theorem! To
Dante, human Existence, and God's ways with men, were all well
represented by those _Malebolges_, _Purgatorios_; to Luther not well.
How was this? Why could not Dante's Catholicism continue; but Luther's
Protestantism must needs follow? Alas, nothing will _continue_.

I do not make much of 'Progress of the Species,' as handled in these
times of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it.
The talk on that subject is too often of the most extravagant,
confused sort. Yet I may say, the fact itself seems certain enough;
nay we can trace out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature of
things. Every man, as I have stated somewhere, is not only a learner
but a doer: he learns with the mind given him what has been; but with
the same mind he discovers farther, he invents and devises somewhat of
his own. Absolutely without originality there is no man. No man
whatever believes, or can believe, exactly what his grandfather
believed: he enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of the
Universe, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe,--which is an
_infinite_ Universe, and can never be embraced wholly or finally by
any vie