years ago, suggests a further advancement in this direction. What we want is less precedent; in reHgion less of Patristic doo;mas, and in law less reverting- to the past for the solution of questions which, if we have availed ourselves of our advantages we should understand better than our forefathers.
Knowledge, either in law or elsewhere, is not alone a looking back, but an eternity of inquiry concerning not only what has been but what is and shall be. When we can no more conceive of a boundary to knowledge than we can conceive of a boundary to space, it is not wise in us to revivify by all our powers dead or dying formulas; for if such a course does not lead to the nihilism of Georgius of Leontini, there is at all events but little progress in it. This same Geor<rius after all is not altooether wrongs in his affirmation that nothing is, or if it be that it cannot be known. Our knowledge comes from nothing and ends in nothing. " Philosophy begins in wonder," says Plato, "for Iris is the child of Thaumas." Nature-worship is the mythology of science, and the myths of Greece reduced to system in the writings of Hesiod and Homer enfolded the germ of all that followed. The pursuit of knowledge is a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous. The end of knowledge is to plunge us yet deeper in the gulf of ignorance. The progress of religion is from the mighty and majestic gods of Homer to the buffoons burlesqued by Luciau; from the deities of savagism, moving clouds, speaking thunder, smiling sunshine and soft kissing breezes, through monotheism and Christianity to the infidelity generated by science. Science in its turn on eveiy side soon strikes the unknowable, and throws back the inquirer after ultimate truth upon something akin to nihilism. In the progress of literature, as elsewhere, we see the same principle manifest. In its earliest stages it assumes the form of epic or lyric poetry, of tragedy and historic narrative—the bloody and the real; later, with
