d you ever spell-bind man into a
Scholar merely, so that he had nothing to discover, to correct; could
you ever establish a Theory of the Universe that were entire,
unimprovable, and which needed only to be got by heart; man then were
spiritually defunct, the Species we now name Man had ceased to exist.
But the gods, kinder to us than we are to ourselves, have forbidden
such suicidal acts. As Phlogiston is displaced by Oxygen, and the
Epicycles of Ptolemy by the Ellipses of Kepler; so does Paganism give
place to Catholicism, Tyranny to Monarchy, and Feudalism to
Representative Government,--where also the process does not stop.
Perfection of Practice, like completeness of Opinion, is always
approaching, never arrived; Truth, in the words of Schiller, _immer
wird, nie ist_; never _is_, always _is a-being_.

Sad, truly, were our condition did we know but this, that Change is
universal and inevitable. Launched into a dark shoreless sea of
Pyrrhonism, what would remain for us but to sail aimless, hopeless; or
make madly merry, while the devouring Death had not yet engulfed us?
As indeed, we have seen many, and still see many do. Nevertheless so
stands it not. The venerator of the Past (and to what pure heart is
the Past, in that "moonlight of memory," other than sad and holy?)
sorrows not over its departure, as one utterly bereaved. The true Past
departs not, nothing that was worthy in the Past departs; no Truth or
Goodness realised by man ever dies, or can die; but is all still here,
and, recognised or not, lives and works through endless changes. If
all things, to speak in the German dialect, are discerned by us, and
exist for us, in an element of Time, and therefore of Mortality and
Mutability; yet Time itself reposes on Eternity: the truly Great and
Transcendental has its basis and substance in Eternity; stands
revealed to us as Eternity in a vesture of Time. Thus in all Poetry,
Worship, Art, Society, as one form passes into another, nothing is
lost: it is but the superficial, as it were the _body_ only, that
grows obsolete and dies; under the mortal body lies a _soul_ which is
immortal; which anew incarnates itself in fairer revelation; and the
Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

In Change, therefore, there is nothing terrible, nothing supernatural:
on the contrary, it lies in the very essence of our lot and life in
this world. Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our
Works and Thoughts