It would be easy for me to develop this parallel by other and still more remarkable facts; but what I have just said will suffice to show that the line of demarcation which philosophers have, upon principle, desired to trace between the physical and moral order, has turned the mind aside from many fertile fields of research and speculation. Let us cite an example. The sun is the visible centre of light, heat, organic life; in fine, of all the movements of our material world. Yet it is but a relative focus, since the sun, with its planetary train, revolves, probably, in company with other suns or systems, around a centre as yet unknown; and as there is no reason why we should pause in this cycloidal progression, this second centre or focus of systems may revolve around a third, the third around a fourth, and so on. Thus we shall have an indeterminate series of relative centres; for the term does not exist of which we can say,--there is the beginning, or here is the end of the series. We do not meet with the absolute in the material, any more than in the intellectual world. Truth, by its power of attraction, sets in motion all the wheels of our understanding; we seek after it eagerly, in the doubt which torments us, in the obscurity which surrounds us; we all feel the need of being enlightened by it, and warmed, and revivified; we all are in need of belief, and, at the same time, of possessing--let there be no illusion in this respect--a certainty or demonstration of what we believe. But the truth which we think our own does not leave the mind at rest; a slight effort suffices, in fact, to teach us that the truth we accept depends upon another and remoter truth, and that the world of thought is thus carried onward in an interminable series of relative truths; unless we find it more convenient to pause here at a primary cause, as elsewhere at a primordial centre, which we may ever identify with the primary cause. But is this truth, supposed to be final, capable of satisfying equally every mind? With this question, dear reader, I close my parenthesis. * * * * *