_Another_ step in thought is early taken in our day, though the civilized world was slow in reaching it. We soon perceive that Nature's answers must catch their tone and compass from our interrogations. In numerous sciences, this axiom carries the whole theory and practice of experiment;--that grand distinction between Bacon's inductive process, and the induction of the ancient world. In other walks of inquiry, intellectual and moral, the same truth has grown up and blossomed with a ruling idea of the crucial or prerogative question: slow in being framed, and difficult often in the asking, but, when asked, certain to elicit a reply. A _third_ postulate is also quickly apparent. Our inquiries must be subject, for utility's sake, to our power of assimilating knowledge. And thus our faculty for asking questions is governed by our faculties for apprehending answers. The _last_ and paramount requirement is _forced_ upon us. Beyond and over all, comes the pressure of our own need and private anxiety. There are many truths which we discern afar off, like features of a smiling land of promise; and, knowing that they must become one day the heritage of mankind, we tend towards them without haste, yet without forgetfulness, and in this temper of mind wait contentedly. But, there are some truths for which we cannot afford to wait. They concern our destinies too closely; they are too near our hearts; too influential on our lives and happiness. The old question asked in the youth of human philosophy, is the one we all begin by asking in our first confidence and eagerness of pursuit. Ask it in what words we may, it always comes to much the same thing; and if we could answer it, we should answer all questions in one. For, though we clothe our query with various shapes, and seldom put it in the form following, its true meaning is, "what are the realities of the Universe, and what the essential ground of all we see and think?" It is always worth a thinker's while to look this human problem more than once in the face. Suppose a faculty[88] for such insight granted, it must be different in kind, rather than degree, from our logic of ordinary life. It cannot proceed discursively, abstracting, generalizing, connecting, deducing. It must know--or look at its object directly, just as genius knows, images and conveys to other minds, not through a train of explanatory definition, but by kindling within them a spark of its own light. If there be such a faculty, it will work, (as Aristotle[89] says of the Supreme Intellect,) by what seems to us most like an act of touch; a figure half-shadowed out when we say we grasp or apprehend a truth; and much as St. Paul speaks, in bidding men to seek and feel after and find the Lord.