nel "carrying his head
in his teeth;" but the feat has never been imitated.

That this is the age of Metaphysics, in the proper, or sceptical
Inquisitory sense; that there was a necessity for its being such an
age, we regard as our indubitable misfortune. From many causes, the
arena of free Activity has long been narrowing, that of sceptical
Inquiry becoming more and more universal, more and more perplexing.
The Thought conducts not to the Deed; but in boundless chaos,
self-devouring, engenders monstrosities, fantasms, fire-breathing
chimeras. Profitable Speculation were this: What is to be done; and
How is it to be done? But with us not so much as the What can be got
sight of. For some generations, all Philosophy has been a painful,
captious, hostile question towards everything in the Heaven above, and
in the Earth beneath: Why art thou there? Till at length it has come
to pass that the worth and authenticity of all things seems dubitable
or deniable: our best effort must be unproductively spent not in
working, but in ascertaining our mere Whereabout, and so much as
whether we are to work at all. Doubt, which, as was said, ever hangs
in the background of our world, has now become our middle-ground and
foreground; whereon, for the time, no fair Life-picture can be
painted, but only the dark air-canvas itself flow round us,
bewildering and benighting.

Nevertheless, doubt as we will, man is actually Here; not to ask
questions, but to do work: in this time, as in all times, it must be
the heaviest evil for him, if his faculty of Action lie dormant, and
only that of sceptical Inquiry exert itself. Accordingly, whoever
looks abroad upon the world, comparing the Past with the Present, may
find that the practical condition of man in these days is one of the
saddest; burdened with miseries which are in a considerable degree
peculiar. In no time was man's life what he calls a happy one; in no
time can it be so. A perpetual dream there has been of Paradises, and
some luxurious Lubberland, where the brooks should run wine, and the
trees bend with ready-baked viands; but it was a dream merely; an
impossible dream. Suffering, contradiction, error, have their quite
perennial, and even indispensable abode in this Earth. Is not labour
the inheritance of man? And what labour for the present is joyous, and
not grievous? Labour, effort, is the very interruption of that ease,
which man foolishly enough fancies to be his happiness; and y