Now one of the most characteristic signs by which such important moments of general revolution in the history of the world are, for the most part, known and distinguished, is a number of great events pressed closely together and following each other in rapid succession; or, in other words, the accelerated course of time. It is no new remark, that, in the political history of our own age, modern Europe has, in the short space of two-and-twenty years, ran through all the epochs of the old Roman world, from the first party struggles of the republic, and its long wars with Carthage, that mistress of the seas, up to the imperial rule of the Cæsars, in the first reigns mild and indulgent, but at the last so fearfully oppressive and cruel; and even up to the final immigration of the northern nations. Such a simple remark is alone sufficient proof that another law now rules in the history of the world--a quicker life pulsates in its arteries than beat in the calmer days of old. Whether, however, this life be thoroughly sound, or, on the contrary, sickly and feverish, that is quite another question. But not only in the political world, but also in the intellectual domain of science has the same accelerated course been noticeable. Only, as compared with that of antiquity, the course or direction pursued by modern science is altogether different. We have traveled with equal celerity, but in quite an opposite course to the ancients. Starting from the last term, we have reversed the series of their mental progression. First of all, in the last decades of the preceding century, the Epicurean cast of thought, or one very nearly resembling it, was the one chiefly predominant in the philosophical world. And then, together with but subordinate to it, came scholastic subtilties and hair-splitting distinctions, similar to those of the later Greek schools, not unaccompanied, perhaps, with the same patient industry of research and extensive erudition, and exercising altogether on the minds of men an influence no less wide, nor less pernicious, than did the most brilliant of the sophists of Greece. All the erroneous systems which it was possible for the human mind to embrace, and which are grounded in its essential qualities, or which could possibly originate in any (so to speak) of its inborn misconceptions, which it took the Greeks several centuries to evolve in slow succession, our age has rapidly, and almost simultaneously, run through in as many decades. And in this fact, if I do not greatly deceive myself, there is much ground of consolation. It encourages me to hope that this inverse progression is leading us back again to the truth--that in this ascending line we are gradually coming nearer to the better times of the first great philosophers of Greece--of a Plato, a Socrates, and a Pythagoras. It must be self-evident, that in this case, and still more so in that analogy of political history which