ers, cathedrals and
mirrors--cups which quench no man's thirst, chandeliers which give no
light, cathedrals in which no one prays, but mirrors in which one sees
oneself more or less faithfully and pleasantly portrayed. There also is
to be seen a gloomy and bottomless lake over which hang like so many
question-marks, the pendants in the sombre roof and the beards of the
thinkers. Such is the ample cave which is exactly identical to the
philosophy it shelters, with its crystals sparkling amid its uncertain
shadows--full of precipices, it is true. It recalls better than anything
else to the new race of men, but with a still greater portion of
mirage-like fascination, that diurnal miracle of our forefathers--the
starry night. Now the crowd of systematic ideas which slowly form and
crystallise there in each brain like mental stalactites is indescribably
enormous. While all the former stalactites of thought are for ever
ramifying and changing their shape, turning as it were from a table into
an altar, or from an eagle into a griffin, new ideas appear here and
there still more surprising. There are always, of course,
Neo-Aristotelians, Neo-Kantians, Neo-Cartesians, and Neo-Pythagoricians.
Let us not forget the commentators of Empedocles to whom his passion for
the volcanic underworld has procured an unexpected rejuvenation of his
antique authority on the minds of men, above all since an archaeologist
has maintained he has found the skeleton of this grand man in pushing an
exploring gallery to the very foot of AEtna which to-day is completely
extinct. But there is ever arising some great reformer with an
unpublished gospel that each attempts to enrich with a new version
destined to take its place. I will cite for example the greatest
intellect of our time, the chief of the fashionable school in sociology.
According to this profound thinker the social development of humanity,
starting on the outer rind of the earth and continuing to-day beneath
its crust, at no great distance from the surface, is destined in
proportion to the growing solar and planetary cooling, to pursue its
course from strata to strata down to the very centre of the earth, while
the population forcibly contracts and civilisation on the contrary
expands at each new descent. It is worth seeing the vigour and
Dante-like precision with which he characterises the social type
peculiar to each of these humanities, immured within its own circle,
growing ever nobler and