think or feel, we take up some philosophical work, and find the writer complacently setting forth a cosmogony or a theory of the Universe; explaining how things came into being; what is the reason why they are not better or worse; what is the end of the whole drama: are we not justified in exclaiming with Carlyle:-- The builder of this Universe was wise, He planned all souls, all systems, planets, particles: The plan he shaped all worlds and æons by Was--Heavens!--was thy small nine-and-thirty articles! Carlyle has been, to some of us, the most stimulating of writers, just because he succeeded in expressing, with unsurpassed power, the emotion which I must be content with indicating--the emotion which is roused by sudden revelations of the infinitudes, the silences and eternities that surround us. We cannot keep it permanently before us; the present absorbs us, and its little interests seem to be all that is important. It is only at moments when, for example, we reflect that our action of a minute ago is already a part of the mysterious past, sinking downwards, and rapidly becoming invisible in the depths of the infinite ocean, that we are startled by a momentary pang, and feel as though to live with a constant sense of our insignificance would be to risk the paralysis of all our powers of thought and action. That way, we are inclined to say, lies madness. We shall lose our heads if we gaze too long into such tremendous depths. Possibly we may restore our equilibrium by meditating upon the infinitesimal, though possibly too we may rather feel that such meditations only reveal another infinite. I intended to make a few reflections suggested by such thoughts, when I found a guide, and, to a great extent, an ally, in a writer who has lately taken up the ancient parable. Mr. Balfour, in a book rather quaintly entitled _Foundations of Belief_ has dwelt upon the vanity of all known philosophy, and has shown, or appears to some of his readers to have endeavoured to show, that it is hopeless to lay any sound foundations on the little film of knowledge beneath which lie the great unknown abysses. He tries to indicate some other basis, though, so far as I can understand him, the foundations of his edifice are ingeniously supported by the superstructure; and that is a kind of architecture which, to my mind, lacks stability. Through a large part of his argument, however, I find myself in the pleasanter position of an ally. He asserts, and I doubt whether any competent thinker would materially differ from him, that there does not, as a matter of fact, exist any established system of philosophic truth--any system upon which we can rely, as we do, in fact, rightly or wrongly rely, upon certain scientific doctrines. We no more doubt the truth of the Newtonian system of astronomy than we doubt that fire burns or that bread nourishes. But the briefest glance at the old systems of philosophy shows us, as Mr. Balfour says, nothing but