Turn to astronomy, and we peer, dazed and sick, into the abysses of time and space opened beneath us; bottomless abysses where no plummet can sound, and all our toylike measures of thousands of ages and millions of miles drop useless from our hands. Can any thought be more tremendous than the question, What are _we_ in this immensity? We had fondly fancied we were Creation’s last and greatest work, the crown and glory of the universe, and that our world was the central stage for the drama of God. Where are we now? When the “stars fall from heaven,” will they “fall on the earth even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs”? Nay, rather will one of the heavenly host so much as notice when our little world, charged with all the hopes of man, bursts like a bubble, and falls in the foam of a meteor shower, illumining for a single night some planet calmly rolling on its way? Let us pass from the outer into the inner realm, and glance at the developments of human thought. The knowledge of Philosophy, properly so called, from Pythagoras and Plato to Kant and Spencer,—is it a Knowledge the increase of which is wholly without “sorrow”? Not the most pathetic poem in literature seems to me half so sad as Lewes’s History of Philosophy. Those endless wanderings amid the labyrinths of Being and Knowing, Substance and Phenomenon, Nominalism and Realism, which, to most men, seem like a troubled “dream within a dream,” to him who has taken the pains to understand them rather appear like the wanderings of the wretch lost in the catacombs. He roams hither and thither, and feels feebly along the walls, and stumbles in the dark, finding himself in a passage which has no outlet, and turns back to seek another way of escape, and grasps at something he deems may contain a clew to the far distant daylight, and, lo! it is but an urn filled with dust and dead men’s bones. Faust is the true type of the student of metaphysics when he marks the skull’s “spectral smile”:— “Saith it not that thy brain, like mine, Still loved and sought the beautiful, Loved truth for its own sake, and sought, Regardless of aught else the while, Like mine the light of cloudless day, And in unsatisfying thought By twilight glimmers led astray, Like mine, at length, sank overwrought?”