t esprit la regne sans tyrannie.
Non, non, ce n'est point comme a l'Academie;
Ce n'est point comme a l'Acadenie.

[6] Desaugiers.

Asylums of common-place, he hints, academies must ever be. But that
sentence is too harsh; the true one is--the academies are asylums of
the ideas and the tastes of the last age. 'By the time,' I have heard a
most eminent man of science observe, 'by the time a man of science
attains eminence on any subject, he becomes a nuisance upon it, because
he is sure to retain errors which were in vogue when he was young, but
which the new race have refuted.' These are the sort of ideas which
find their home in academies, and out of their dignified windows
pooh-pooh new things. I may seem to have wandered far from early
society, but I have not wandered. The true scientific method is to
explain the past by the present--what we see by what we do not see. We
can only comprehend why so many nations have not varied, when we see
how hateful variation is; how everybody turns against it; how not only
the conservatives of speculation try to root it out, but the very
innovators invent most rigid machines for crushing the 'monstrosities
and anomalies'--the new forms, out of which, by competition and trial,
the best is to be selected for the future. The point I am bringing out
is simple:--one most important pre-requisite of a prevailing nation is
that it should have passed out of the first stage of civilisation into
the second stage--out of the stage where permanence is most wanted into
that where variability is most wanted; and you cannot comprehend why
progress is so slow till you see how hard the most obstinate tendencies
of human nature make that step to mankind.

Of course the nation we are supposing must keep the virtues of its
first stage as it passes into the after stage, else it will be trodden
out; it will have lost the savage virtues in getting the beginning of
the civilised virtues; and the savage virtues which tend to war are the
daily bread of human nature. Carlyle said, in his graphic way, 'The
ultimate question between every two human beings is, "Can I kill thee,
or canst thou kill me?"' History is strewn with the wrecks of nations
which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal
of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as
soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it. But these
nations have come out of the 'pre-econom