But, in every age,
one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive genius,
which can only build on a secure foundation, or cursed with the spirit
of mere scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and
comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and
unmindful of 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.
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