That man should know so much of the _universe_, and so very little of _himself_, is, indeed, one of the circumstances, which, in the language of the same poet, most strongly characterize him, as the “jest and riddle” of that world, of which he is also no less truly “the glory.” “That the intelligence of any being,” to use the words of D'Alembert, “should not pass beyond certain limits--that, in one species of beings, it should be more or less circumscribed, than in another--all this is not surprising, more than that a blade of grass should be less tall than a shrub; or a shrub than an oak. But that the _same_ being should be at once arrested by the narrow circle which nature has traced around him, and yet constantly reminded, that, beyond these limits, there are objects which he is never to attain--that he should be able to reason, till he loses himself, on the existence and nature of these objects, though condemned to be eternally ignorant of them--that he should have too little sagacity to _resolve_ an infinity of questions, which he has yet sagacity enough to _make_--that the principle within us, which thinks, should ask itself in vain, what it is which constitutes its thought, and that this thought, which sees so many things, so _distant_, should yet not be able to see itself, which is so _near_,--_that self_, which it is notwithstanding always striving to see and to know--these are contradictions, which, even in the very pride of our reasoning, cannot fail to surprise and confound us.” All that remains for us, in that impossibility which nature has imposed on us of attaining a more intimate knowledge of the essence and constitution either of mind or of matter, is to attend to the phenomena which they present, analysing whatever is complex, and tracing the order of every sequence. By attentive reflection on the phenomena themselves, and on all the circumstances which precede or follow them, we shall be able to discover the relations which they mutually bear, and to distinguish their casual coincidence, or succession, from those invariable relations which nature has established among them as causes and effects. This, humble as it may seem, is, as I have said, the true philosophy of man; because it is all of which man is capable. To inquire, as may be thought, more deeply into the _essences_ of things, or the nature of certain supposed bonds by which they are connected, is to show, not that we have advanced far in the progress of science, but that we have gone far astray; not that we know _more_ than philosophers of humbler views and pretensions, but that we know _less_; since it proves that we are unacquainted with the limits within which nature has bounded our prospect, and have not attained that prime knowledge, which consists in knowing how little can be known.