A modern poet, Swinburne, follows still on the same side, in prose: 'After all, man is man; he is not wicked, and he is not good; by no means white as snow; but by means black as a coal; black _and_ white, piebald, striped, dubious.' These ideas, so curiously similar in three such different minds, may seem to set at nought the dreams of the perfectibility of our species; but at the same time there is nothing in them to corroborate the gloomy verdict of Buckle, that 'we cannot assume in the present state of our knowledge that there has been any permanent improvement in the moral or intellectual faculties of man.' The above is one of the most depressing statements a philosopher has ever made; but it seems to us to be directly contradicted by an even still greater name. 'I have long felt,' says Mill, 'that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate and in the main indelible, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the great stumbling-blocks to human improvement.' On the other hand, a thinker of quite another sort, Francis Galton, exclaims: 'I have no patience with the hypothesis, occasionally expressed and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort.' Where philosophers thus differ, we do not pretend to say which is true; but there is no doubt as to which opinion would suggest industry and which sloth. Indeed, Mr Galton's views if carried to their full length would approach to fatalism, and might almost be placed beside the famous song of Messrs Moody and Sankey: Doing is a deadly thing; doing ends in death. Oliver Wendell Holmes has described the various intellects of man (but without going into the hereditary question) with as much wit as truth: 'One-story intellects, two-story intellects, three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors who have no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalise, using the labours of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealise, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above through the skylight.... Poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture, in the attics.'