f thorns and
stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of their own. The sceptics end
in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in
the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and
governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow
into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language
which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an
epoch.

Each such answer to the great question, invariably asserted by the
followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and
final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century,
or it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply
to have been a mere approximation to the truth--tolerable chiefly on
account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly
intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.

In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man
and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the
comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former
term we take the mental progress of the race. History shows that the
human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows
too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder
to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at
intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another, itself but
temporary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be terribly distant,
but every moult is a step gained, and of such there have been many.

Since the revival of learning, whereby the Western races of Europe were
enabled to enter upon that progress towards true knowledge, which was
commenced by the philosophers of Greece, but was almost arrested in
subsequent long ages of intellectual stagnation, or, at most, gyration,
the human larva has been feeding vigorously, and moulting in proportion.
A skin of some dimension was cast in the 16th century, and another
towards the end of the 18th, while, within the last fifty years, the
extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread
among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that
a new ecdysis seems imminent. But this is a process not unusually
accompanied by many throes and some sickness and debility, or, it may
be, by graver disturbances; so that every good citizen must feel bound
to facil