“In the book of the Apocalypse we read, ‘And there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.’ In the heaven of souls this is rare. According to St Augustine the Eternal Wisdom does not cease to speak to human creatures, and reason does not cease its activities in us. We have only to listen, and to listen we must keep silence. But amongst men, and especially amongst thinkers, who can keep still silence? The generality of men, especially those who study, have not a single half hour of silence in the day, men of learning either listen to those who speak, or are speaking themselves; and when they find themselves alone and silent, then they permit books to speak to them, and they devour long discourses, with rapid glances, in a few minutes.” Under these conditions all study requiring much reflection is impossible. Attention, Abstraction, Contradiction, Speech--only a few persons appreciate the importance of these four words, and hardly any one doubts that they know the part played in their lives by the things which these words represent. If we wish to know ourselves many subjects of all kinds must be studied simultaneously; religion and religions; the opinions of the ancients and of our contemporaries; men as they now are and as they were. Renan has well characterised primitive men in attributing to them “a special feeling for nature which enabled them, with wonderful delicacy and accuracy, of which we have no conception, to perceive the qualities which furnished names; and they saw innumerable things at once.” The Hindoos, who were writers many centuries before our present era, must have inherited from their primitive ancestors this special feeling for nature, or they would not have composed those verses in the 129th hymn: “Everything in the beginning was hidden in gloom--the germ which was covered by the husk was brought forth by the power of heat. On this germ rested love, the spring of the mind, yes, and the poets, in meditating thereon, discovered in their souls the tie between the things created and the things uncreated.--This spark, comes it from the earth, piercing all, penetrating into all, or comes it from heaven?” These passages have something modern in them; they might have been written now when science seeks to fuse heaven and earth, which was not done formerly. The cord does not cease to vibrate. The persistence of this phenomenon has different comments made on it. “It is the effect of heredity,” says modern science; “it is a contemporaneous effect of the fall,” says theology. Perhaps the one and the other make of the human race one unique being which continues through the ages.