gain, and again, we say, the great, the creative
and enduring is ever a secret to itself; only the small, the barren
and transient is otherwise.

* * * * *

If we now, with a practical medical view, examine, by this same test
of Unconsciousness, the Condition of our own Era, and of man's Life
therein, the diagnosis we arrive at is nowise of a flattering sort.
The state of Society in our days is, of all possible states, the least
an unconscious one: this is specially the Era when all manner of
Inquiries into what was once the unfelt, involuntary sphere of man's
existence, find their place, and, as it were, occupy the whole domain
of thought. What, for example, is all this that we hear, for the last
generation or two, about the Improvement of the Age, the Spirit of the
Age, Destruction of Prejudice, Progress of the Species, and the March
of Intellect, but an unhealthy state of self-sentience, self-survey;
the precursor and prognostic of still worse health? That Intellect do
march, if possible at double-quick time, is very desirable;
nevertheless, why should she turn round at every stride, and cry: See
you what a stride I have taken! Such a marching of Intellect is
distinctly of the spavined kind; what the Jockeys call "all action and
no go." Or at best, if we examine well, it is the marching of that
gouty Patient, whom his Doctors had clapt on a metal floor
artificially heated to the searing point, so that he was obliged to
march, and did march with a vengeance--nowhither. Intellect did not
awaken for the first time yesterday; but has been under way from
Noah's Flood downwards: greatly her best progress, moreover, was in
the old times, when she said nothing about it. In those same "dark
ages," Intellect (metaphorically as well as literally) could invent
_glass_, which now she has enough ado to grind into _spectacles_.
Intellect built not only Churches, but a Church, _the_ Church, based
on this firm Earth, yet reaching up, and leading up, as high as
Heaven; and now it is all she can do to keep its doors bolted, that
there be no tearing of the Surplices, no robbery of the Alms-box. She
built a Senate-house likewise, glorious in its kind; and now it costs
her a well-nigh mortal effort to sweep it clear of vermin, and get the
roof made rain-tight.

But the truth is, with Intellect, as with most other things, we are
now passing from that first or boastful stage of Self-sentience into
the second or p