no longer need any human innovations, since by this key all that is old and eternal shall receive a trebly-exalted significance and a doubly-new life. But besides the political body and the religious community, the world of letters forms a third society. Though numerically smaller, yet in its effects on the minds of men, whether it moves freely and diffuses itself without the rigid restraints of form, or is narrowly confined to the formalism of the school, it is, perhaps, as great as either. Spiritual in its matter and in its dissemination, it either renounces a divine sanction, and stands under the protection and supervision of the state--such, at least, is the predominant relation in recent times--or, as was formerly the case, it grows and flourishes beneath the shelter and through the fostering care of ecclesiastical institutions. Holding an intermediate place between the two other bodies of human society--in its subject-matter more akin to the one, but deriving from the other its external support--it is also of a mixed nature and partakes of both. But the inborn and original sin of science is exactly similar to that which infects political life. Manifesting itself in a twofold aberration, it either assumes, in the spirit of anarchy, an hostile position toward all that exists from without, or is given to men from above, or, perhaps, comes forward in a predominant love of system or scientific sectarianism, which not unfrequently is as fanatical as the political party-spirit with which, moreover, it is often very nearly and closely allied.