But, if the affairs of men pass in
recurring cycles--if the course of events with one individual has a
resemblance to the course of events with another--if there be analogies
in the progress of nations, and circumstances reappear after due periods
of time, the succession of events thus displayed before us in the
intellectual history of Greece may perhaps be recognised again in
grander proportions on the theatre of all Europe. If there is for the
human mind a predetermined order of development, may we not reasonably
expect that the phenomena we have thus been noticing on a small scale in
a single nation will reappear on the great scale in a continent; that
the philosophical study of this history of the past will not only serve
as an interpretation of many circumstances in the history of Europe in
the Dark and Middle Ages, but will also be a guide to us in pointing out
future events as respects all mankind? For, though it is true that the
Greek intellectual movement was anticipated, as respects its completion,
by being enveloped and swallowed up in the slower but more gigantic
movements of the southern European mind, just as a little expanding
circle upon the sea may be obliterated and borne away by more imposing
and impetuous waves, so even the movement of a continent may be lost in
the movement of a world. It was criticism and physical discovery, and
intellectual activity, arising from political concentration, that so
profoundly affected the modes of Grecian thought, and criticism and
discovery have within the last four hundred years done the same in all
Europe. To one who forms his expectations of the future from the history
of the past--who recalls the effect produced by the establishment of the
Roman empire, in permitting free personal intercommunication among all
the Mediterranean nations, and thereby not only destroying the ancient
forms of thought which for centuries had resisted all other means of
attack, but also replacing them by a homogeneous idea--it must be
apparent that the wonderfully increased facilities for locomotion, the
inventions of our own age, are the ominous precursors of a vast
philosophical revolution.

[Sidenote: The organization of hypocrisy.]

Between that period during which a nation has been governed by its
imagination and that in which it submits to reason, there is a
melancholy interval. The constitution of man is such that, for a long
time after he has discovered the incorrectness of t