1. One of these points is that passage in history which informs us that the Greek Anaxagoras was the first to enunciate the doctrine that [GREEK: nous],--Understanding in general, or Reason, governs the world. It is not intelligence as self-conscious Reason--not a spirit as such that is meant; and we must clearly distinguish these from each other. The movement of the solar system takes place according to unchangeable laws. These laws are Reason, implicit in the phenomena in question; but neither the sun nor the planets which revolve around it according to these laws can be said to have any consciousness of them. A thought of this kind--that nature is an embodiment of Reason, that is, unchangeably subordinate to universal laws--appears nowise striking or strange to us. We are accustomed to such conceptions and find nothing extraordinary in them; and I have mentioned this extraordinary occurrence partly to show how history teaches that ideas of this kind, which may seem trivial to us, have not always been in the world; that, on the contrary, such a thought makes an epoch in the annals of human intelligence. Aristotle says of Anaxagoras, as the originator of the thought in question, that he appeared as a sober man among the drunken. Socrates adopted the doctrine from Anaxagoras, and it forthwith became the ruling idea in philosophy--except in the school of Epicurus, who ascribed all events to chance. "I was delighted with the sentiment," Plato makes Socrates say, "and hoped I had found a teacher who would show me Nature in harmony with Reason, who would demonstrate in each particular phenomenon its specific aim, and, in the whole, the grand object of the universe. I would not have surrendered this hope for a great deal. But how very much was I disappointed, when, having zealously applied myself to the writings of Anaxagoras, I found that he adduces only external causes, such as atmosphere, ether, water, and the like." It is evident that the defect which Socrates complains of respecting Anaxagoras' doctrine does not concern the principle itself, but the shortcoming of the propounder in applying it to nature in the concrete. Nature is not deduced from that principle; the latter remains, in fact, a mere abstraction, inasmuch as the former is not comprehended and exhibited as a development of it--an organization produced by and from Reason. I wish, at the very outset, to call your attention to the important difference between a conception, a principle, a truth limited to an abstract form, and its determinate application and concrete development. This distinction affects the whole fabric of philosophy; and among other bearings of it there is one to which we shall have to revert at the close of our view of universal history, in investigating the aspect of political affairs in the most recent period.