f prudence, or the art of securing a
present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be
made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of
manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we
will[689] we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten
commandments.

CIRCLES.[690]

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It
is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine[691]
described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere
and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the
copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already
deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every
human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action
admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in
nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another
dawn risen on mid-noon,[692] and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at
once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently
serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every
department.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
holds its fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which
draws after it all this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise
into another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture[693] is
all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice: here and there a
solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of
snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the
genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek
letters[694] last a little longer, but are already passing under the
same sentence and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation
of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built
out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the
decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy th