in the drama, of humanity has been transformed into an empty husk, and is only a name. The sensuous reality of life, as it is limited in space and time, and made palpable in matter and motion, is however the earliest cradle of humanity. The environment of sense is prior in the order of time to the environment of thought. Who, it may be asked, first wrought their way out of that atmosphere of sense into an ether of pure thought? Who first saw that in sense there was yet present something more than sensation,--that the deliverances of sense-perception rest upon and involve relations, ties, distinctions, which contradict its self-confidence and carry us beyond its simple indications?. Who laid the first foundations of that world of reason in which the civilised nations of the modern period live and move? The answer is, the Greek philosophers: and in the first place the philosophers of Elea. For Hegel the history of thought begins with Greece. All that preceded the beginnings of Greek speculation, and most that lies outside it, has only a secondary interest for the culture of the West. But 'many heroes lived before the days of Agamemnon,' The records of culture no longer begin with Greece. Even in Hegel's own day, voices, like those of the poet Rückert (in his 'habilitation'-exercise), were heard declaring that the true fountain of European thought, the real philosophy, was to be sought in the remoter East. Since the time of Hegel, the study of primitive life, and of the rise of primitive ideas in morals and religion, has enabled us to some extent to trace the early gropings of barbarian fancy and reason. The comparative study of languages has, on the other hand, partly revealed the contrivances by which human reason has risen from one grade of consciousness to another. The sciences of language and of primitive culture have revealed new depths in the development of thought, where thought is still enveloped in nature and sense and symbols,--depths which were scarcely dreamed of in the earlier part of the present century. Here and there, investigators have even supposed that they had found the cradle of some elements in art, religion, and society, or, it may be, of humanity itself.