But history, like Cronos of old, possessed a strange power of devouring its own offspring. Gradually, from the habit of regarding human affairs in a state of flux and more particularly from the growth of the idea of progress, the past lost its hold over men. It became a matter of curiosity but not of authority, and history as it was understood in Renan's day has in ours almost ceased to be written. Science on the other hand is the observation of phenomena regarded chiefly in the relation of space--for it is correct, I believe, to assert that the laws of energy may be reduced to this point--and as such is not subject to this devouring act of time. It frankly discards the past and as frankly dwells in the present. It is not my purpose, indeed it would be quite superfluous, to reckon up the immense acquisitions of the scientific method in the past century: they are the theme of schoolboys and savants alike, the pride and wonder of our civilisation. Nor need I dwell on the new philosophy which sprang up from the union of the historic and the scientific sense and still subsists. Not the system of Hegel or Schopenhauer or of any other professor of metaphysics is the true philosophy of the age; these are but echoes of a past civilisation, voices and _præterea nil_. Evolution is the living guide of our thought, assigning to the region of the unknowable the conceptions of unity and perfect rest, and building up its theories on the visible experience of motion and change and development. It has reduced the universal flux of Heraclitus to a scientific system and assimilated it to our inner growth; it has become as essentially a factor of our attitude toward the natural world as Newton's laws of gravitation. But if our thoughts are directed almost wholly to the sphere of motion, yet this does not mean that the longing after quietude and peace has passed entirely from the mind of man; the thirst of the human heart is too deep for that. Only the world has learned to look for peace in another direction. In place of that faith which would deny valid reality to changing forms, we have taught ourselves to find a certain order in disorder, which we call law,--whether it be the law of progress or the law of energy,--and on the stability of this law we are willing to stake our desired tranquillity.