In all such speculations a method has been applied to the State identical with that indicated in the second lecture. They exhibit the effort of the human mind to discover in the universe the evolution of a design in harmony with its own conception of what individual life is or ought to be. Genius, beauty, virtue, the breast consecrated to lofty aims, are still the dearest target to disaster, and to the blind assaults of fate and man. In individual life, therefore, the primitive conception has been modified, but in the wider and more intricate life of a State the endless variety of incidents, characters, fortunes, the succession of centuries, and of modes of thought, literatures, arts, creeds, the revolutions in political ideals, offer so complex a mass of phenomena that the breakdown of the theory, patent at once in the narrower sphere of observation, is here obscured and shielded from detection. Man's intellect is easily the dupe of the heart's desire, and in the brief span of human life willingly carries a fiction to the grave. And he who defends a pleasing dream is necessarily honoured amongst men more than the visionary whose course is towards the glacier heights and the icy solitudes of thought. § 4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY The second theory is that of a cycle in human affairs, which controls the rise and fall of empires by a law similar to that of the seasons and the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. This theory varies little; the metaphors, the figures by which it is darkened or made clearer change, but the essential idea remains one in the great myth of Plato or in the Indian epics, in the rigid steel-clasped system of Vico, or in the sentimental musings of Volney. The vicissitudes are no more determined by the neglect or performance of religious rites or certain ethical rules. Man's life is regarded as part of the universal scheme of things, and the fate of empires as subject to natural laws. The mode in which this theory originates thus connects itself at once with the mode of the Chaldean astrology and modern evolution.