chimerical or even destructive. This is the province of
the philosophy of history. It guides itself by those general principles
for the pursuit of truth which have been noticed in brief in the earlier
pages of this book. Looking before as well as after, it aspires in the
united light of experience and the laws of mind, to construct for the
race an ideal within the reach of its capacities, yet which will
develope them to the fullest extent, a pole-star to which it can trust
in this night teeming with will-o'-the wisps.

The opinion that the history of mind is a progress whose end will be
worth more than was its beginning, may not prove true in fact--the
concrete expression never wholly covers the abstract requirements--but
it is undoubtedly true in theory. The progress, so far, has been by no
means a lineal one--each son a better man than his father--nor even, as
some would have it, a spiral one--periodical recurrences to the same
historical ideas, but each recurrence a nearer approach to the
philosophical idea--but it has been far more complex and irregular than
any geometrical figure will illustrate. These facile generalizations do
not express it.

Following the natural laws of thought man has erred infinitely, and his
errors have worked their sure result--they have destroyed him. There is
no "relish of salvation" in an error; otherwise than that it is sure to
kill him who obstructs the light by harboring it. There is no sort of
convertability of the false into the true, as shallow thinkers of the
day teach.

Man has only escaped death when at first by a lucky chance, and then by
personal and inherited experience, his thoughts drifted or were forced
into conformity with the logical laws of thought.

A historic idea is a complex product formed of numerous conceptions,
some true and others false. Its permanency and efficacy are in direct
proportion to the number and clearness of the former it embraces. When
it is purging itself of the latter, the nation is progressive; when the
false are retained, their poison spreads and the nation decays.

The _periodical recurrence_ of historic ideas is one of their most
striking features. The explanations offered for it have been various.
The ancient doctrines of an exact repetition of events in the cycles of
nature, and of the transmigration of souls, drew much support from it;
and the modern modification of the latter theory as set forth by
Wordsworth and Lessing, are distinct