What ages have rolled before I had my being! How many will flow after I am gone! And what a small space do I occupy in this grand succession of years! I am as a blank; this diminutive interval is not sufficient to distinguish me from that nothing to which I must inevitably return. I seem only to have made my appearance for the purpose of increasing the number; and I am even useless--for the play would have been just as well performed, had I remained behind the scenes." Wrote Voltaire, "I am ignorant how I was formed, and how I was born. I was perfectly ignorant, for a quarter of my life, of the reasons of all that I saw, heard, and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by rote in imitation of other parrots. When I looked about me and within me, I conceived that something existed from all eternity. Since there are beings actually existing, I concluded that there is some being necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus the first step which I took to extricate myself from my ignorance overpassed the limits of all ages--the boundaries of time. But when I was desirous of proceeding in this infinite career, I could neither perceive a single path, nor clearly distinguish a single object; and from the flight which I took to contemplate eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of my original ignorance." "Heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful, or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know all; which being impossible, they fall," said Sir Thomas Browne, "upon the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything." Hiero, tyrant of Sicily, asked old Simonides to tell him what God is. The poet answered him that it was not a question that could be immediately answered, and that he wanted a whole day to think upon it. When that term was over, Hiero asked the answer; but Simonides desired two days more to consider of it. This was not the last delay he asked; he was often called on to give an answer, and every time he desired double the time he had last demanded. The tyrant, wondering at it, desired to know the reason of it. I do so, answered Simonides, because the more I examine the matter, the more obscure it appears to me. "After reading all that has been written," says the poet Poe, "and all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment." "I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me," says Emerson.... "I am very content with knowing, if only I could know.... To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world." "You read of but one wise man," says Congreve, "and all that he knew was--that he knew nothing." "The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge." "If God," said Lessing, "held all truth shut in his