He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems, maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that in the business of the visible working world they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong. Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences; will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will anticipate the future with a continuous and uninterrupted development; this, too, by a process, not negative and distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely positive and constructive. I am not called upon to sit in the seat of judgment; but I may say that it would be singular if the attempt succeeded. Such a system would be all-comprehensive, because not limited by space, time, or race; its principle would be extensive as Matter itself, and, consequently, eternal. Meanwhile he satisfies himself,—the main point. Students of metaphysics have of late years defined the abuse of their science as “the morphology of common opinion.” Contemporary investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with introspection; their labors have become merely physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the study of averages. For, says La Rochefoucauld, _Il est plus aisé de connoître l’homme en général que de connoître un homme en particulier_; and on so wide a subject all views must be one-sided. But this is not the fashion of Easterns. They have still to treat great questions _ex analogiâ universi_, instead of _ex analogiâ hominis_. They must learn the basis of sociology, the philosophic conviction that mankind should be studied, not as a congeries of individuals, but as an organic whole. Hence the _Zeitgeist_, or historical evolution of the collective consciousness of the age, despises the obsolete opinion that Society, the State, is bound by the same moral duties as the simple citizen. Hence, too, it holds that the “spirit of man, being of equal and uniform substance, doth usually suppose and feign in nature a greater equality and uniformity than is in Truth.”