Philology began with the unqualified reverence and apotheosis of the Greeks. Now it has begun to draw other languages, other peoples and their histories, into its sphere; it has, through the mediation of comparative linguistics, already struck up, though as yet somewhat cautiously, a friendship with physiology. Physical science began in the witch's kitchen. It now embraces the organic and inorganic worlds, and with the physiology of articulation and the theory of the senses, has even pushed its researches, at times impertinently, into the province of mental phenomena. In short, we come to the understanding of much within us solely by directing our glance without, and _vice versa_. Every object belongs to both sciences. You, ladies, are very interesting and difficult problems for the psychologist, but you are also extremely pretty phenomena of nature. Church and State are objects of the historian's research, but not less phenomena of nature, and in part, indeed, very curious phenomena. If the historical sciences have inaugurated wide extensions of view by presenting to us the thoughts of new and strange peoples, the physical sciences in a certain sense do this in a still greater degree. In making man disappear in the All, in annihilating him, so to speak, they force him to take an unprejudiced position without himself, and to form his judgments by a different standard from that of the petty human. But if you should ask me now why man has two eyes, I should answer: That he may look at nature justly and accurately; that he may come to understand that he himself, with all his views, correct and incorrect, with all his _haute politique_, is simply an evanescent shred of nature; that, to speak with Mephistopheles, he is a part of the part, and that it is absolutely unjustified, "For man, the microcosmic fool, to see Himself a whole so frequently." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 17: This effect is particularly noticeable in the size of workmen on high chimneys and church-steeples--"steeple Jacks." When the cables were slung from the towers of the Brooklyn bridge (277 feet high), the men sent out in baskets to paint them, appeared, against the broad background of heaven and water, like flies.--_Trans._] [Footnote 18: See Joh. Müller, _Vergleichende Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes_, Leipsic, 1826.] ON SYMMETRY.[19] An ancient philosopher once remarked that people who cudgelled their brains about the nature of the moon reminded him of men who discussed the laws and institutions of a distant city of which they had heard no more than the name. The true philosopher, he said, should turn his glance within, should study himself and his notions of right and wrong; only thence could he derive real profit. This ancient formula for happiness might be restated in the familiar words of the Psalm: "Dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed."