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the mind of the latter, as Miller describes it, "a labyrinth without a clew, in whose recesses was a vast amount of book knowledge that never could be used, and was of no use to himself or any one else;" the former wielding all his stores as he swung his sledge. What is wanted is the comprehensive hand, and not the prehensile tail.

Involved in such an equipoise is the decisiveness, the will force, that not only holds, but holds the balance. Common as it may be it is none the less pitiable to be just acute enough constantly to question, but not to answer forever to raise difficulties and never to solve them. Wakeful, but the wakefulness of weakliness. Fine-strung minds are they often, acquisitive, subtle, and sensitive, able to look all around their labyrinth and see far into darkness, but not out to the light. It is by nature rather a German than an AngloSaxon habit. It is not always fatal even there. De Wette, "the veteran doubter," rallied at the last and, like Bunyan's Feeble-mind, went over almost shouting. In this country youth often have it somewhat later than the measles and the chickenpox, and come through very well, without even a pockmark. Sometimes it becomes epidemic, and assumes a languid or typhoidal cast not Positivism, but Agnosticism. It is rather fashionable to eulogize perplexity and doubt as a mark of strength and genius. But whatever may be the passing fashion, the collective judgment of the ages has settled it that the permanent state of mental hesitancy and indecision, in whatever sphere of thought

and action, is and must be a false condition. It indicates the scrofulous diathesis, and calls for more iron in the blood. It is a lower type of manhood. It abdicates the province of a human intelligence, which is to seek and find truth. It abrogates the moral obligation to prove all things and hold fast that which is good. It revolts from the great problem of life, which calls on us to know, and to know that we may do. Out upon this apotheosis of doubt! It is the sick man glorying in his infirmity, the beggar boasting of his intellectual rags.

The comprehensive and decisive tend naturally to the incisive. The power to take a subject by its handle and poise it on its center is perhaps the consummation of merely intellectual culture. When all its nutriment has been converted into bone and muscle and sinew and nerve, then the mind bounds to its work, lithe and strong, like a hunting leopard on its game. It was exactly the power with which our Webster handled his case, till it seemed to the farmer too simple to require a great man to argue. It was the quality that Lincoln so toiled at through his early manhood, and so admirably gained the power of presenting things clearly to "plain people." You may call it "the art of putting things," but it is the art of conceiving things. It is no trick of style, but a character of thinking, and it marks the harvest time of a manly culture.

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I will add to this enumeration one other quality, one without which this harvest will not ripen. I

speak of mental docility and reverence. A man will have looked forth to little purpose on the universe if he does not see that even with his expanding circle of light there is an ever-enlarging circle of darkness around it. He will have compared his achievements with those of the race to little profit, if he does not recognize his relative insignificance, gathering sands on the ocean shore.

The wide range and rapid outburst of modern learning tend undoubtedly to arrogance and conceit. We gleefully traverse our new strip of domain and ask, Were there ever such beings as we? Yes, doubtless there were clearer, greater, and nobler. Wisdom, skill, and strength were not born with us. All the qualities of manly thought, though with ruder implements and cruder materials, have been as conspicuously exhibited down through the ages past as in our day. The power of governing, ability in war, diplomacy in peace, subtle dialectics, clear insight, the art of conversation, persuasive and impressive speech, high art in every form, whatever constitutes the test of good manhood, has been here in full force. It would puzzle us yet to lay the stones of Baalbec, or to carve, move, and set up the great statue of Rameses. Within a generation Euclid of Alexandria was teaching geometry in Dartmouth College, and Heraclides and Aristarchus anticipated Copernicus by sixteen centuries. No man has surpassed the sculptures of Rhodes, or the paintings of the sixteenth century. The cathedral of Cologne is the offspring of forgotten brains. Such

men as Anselm were educated on the Trivium and Quadrivium. Five hundred years ago Merton College could show such men as Geoffrey Chaucer, William of Occam, and John Wickliffe. If the history of science can produce four brighter contemporary names than Napier, Kepler, Descartes, and Galileo, let them be forthcoming. But when, still earlier by a century and a half, we behold a man who was not only architect, engineer, and sculptor, and in painting the rival of Angelo, but who, as Hallam proves, "anticipated in the compass of a few pages the discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Maestlin, Maurolycus, and Castelli immortal," it may well "strike us," he suggests, "with something like the awe of supernatural knowledge"; and in the presence of Leonardo da Vinci the modern scientist of highest rank may stand with uncovered head.

If wisdom was not born with us, neither will it die with us. There will be something left to know. Our facts will be tested, our theories probed, and our assertions exploded by better minds than ours. If it be true as Bacon says, "prudens interrogatio dimidium scientia," it is also true "impudens assertio excidium scientiæ." We are in these days treated to "demonstrations" which scarcely rise to the level of presumptions, but rather of presumption. There is an accumulation. of popular dogmatism that is very likely doomed within a century to be swept into the same oblivion with the "Christian Astrology" of William Lilly and the "Ars Magna" of Raymond Lully- a mass of rubbish that

is waiting for another Caliph Omar and the bathfires of Alexandria.

It will not answer to mistake the despotism of hypothesis for the reign of law, or physical law for the great "I AM." True thinkers must respect other thinkers and God. They cannot ignore the primal utterances of consciousness, the laws of logic, or the truths of history. Foregone conclusions are not to bar out the deepest facts of human nature or the most stupendous events in the story of the race. Hume may not rule out the settled laws of evidence the moment they touch the borders of religion; nor may Strauss by the simple assertion that miracles are impossible manacle the arm of God. Comte may not put his extinguisher upon the great underlying verities of our being, nor Tyndall jump the iron track of his own principles to smuggle into matter a "potency and promise" of all "life." Huxley cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through fourteen stages of vertebrate and eight of invertebrate life up to the great imaginary monera, the father and mother of us all. It will be time to believe a million things in a lump when one of them is fully proved in detail. We have no disposition even with so eminent an authority as St. George Mivart to denominate Natural Selection "a puerile hypothesis." We will promise to pay our respects to our "early progenitor" of "arboreal habits" and "ears

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