afternoon peace, the gentle affections of the present scene, obscure the future from our view, and render it curiously enough, even less interesting than the past. To-day, which may be our last, engrosses us far more than to-morrow, which may be our FOREVER; and the grave into which we are just stepping down troubles us far less than in youth, when half a century lay between us and it.

What is the explanation of this strange phenomenon? Is it a merciful dispensation arranged by the Ruler of our life to soften and to ease a crisis which would be too grand and awful to be faced with dignity or calm, if it were actually realised at all? Is it that thought

or that vague substitute for thought which we call time has brought us half unconsciously, to the conclusion that the whole question is insoluble, and that reflection is wasted where reflection can bring us no nearer to an issue? Or finally, as I know is true far oftener than we fancy, is it that threescore years and ten have quenched the passionate desire for life with which at first we stepped upon the scene? We are tired, some of us, with unending and unprofitable toil; we are satiated, others of us, with such ample pleasures as earth can yield us; we have had enough of ambition, alike in its successes and its failures; the joys and blessings of human affection on which, whatever their crises and vicissitudes, no righteous or truthful man will cast a slur, are yet so blended with pains which partake of their intensity; the thirst for knowledge is not slaked, indeed, but the capacity for

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the labour by which alone it can be gained has consciously died out; the appetite for life, in short, is gone, the frame is worn and the faculties exhausted; and-possibly this is the key to the phenomenon we are examining—age CANNOT, from the very law of its nature, conceive itself endowed with the bounding energies of youth, and without that vigour both of exertion and desire, renewed existence can offer no inspiring charms. Our being upon earth has been enriched by vivid interests and precious joys, and we are deeply grateful for the gift; but we are wearied with one life, and feel scarcely qualified to enter on the claims, even though balanced by the felicities and glories, of another. It may be the fatigue which comes with age-fatigue of the fancy as well as of the frame ; but somehow, what we yearn for most instinctively at last is rest, and the peace which we can imagine the easiest because we know it best is that of sleep.

XIII.

CAN TRUTHS BE APPREHENDED WHICH COULD NOT

HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED? 1

IN treating this subject, I desire rather to propound a question than to maintain a thesis. I feel, too, as if it were a matter rather for reflection than for argument,—one on which it is more possible to reach a sort of persuasion in one's own mind, than to offer cogent pleas to satisfy the minds of others. I bring it forward, therefore, rather in the hopes that metaphysicians with more trained instruments of thought than mine may be able to throw light upon it, than with any expectation that I can do so myself.

The question, then, is briefly this :-Can any truth be received that is, accepted and assimilated—by the human intellect, which that intellect might not in the course of time have reached or wrought out for itself? Does not the power of apprehending a proposition imply and involve the power, by the processes of research and meditation, of constructing or divining it ? Can anything which could not have been discovered by us be so revealed to us as to make it our own? or as I should prefer to express myself, do not

1 Contemporary Review, February 1875.

the discernment, recognition, absorption by the mind of a truth, when once announced, indicate and postulate precisely the same faculties as those needed to originate it,—i.e., to arrive at it by native mental operations? These are somewhat unscientific and unprecise expressions of my meaning, I am aware, but they may suffice to convey the essence of it.

It would seem that in matters distinctly within human cognisance-whether information communicated by scientific inquirers, or truths established by the reasonings of the wise-the conclusion is certain, and the above questions may be answered confidently in the negative. What man has done man may do. Matters of positive knowledge, the facts of science, the operations of nature, and the laws or principles deducible from those operations can be verified by those to whom they are announced; the observations and experiments can be repeated, the results tested, and the informers cross-examined, by the recipients or hearers; the faculties and mental processes needed thus to test and verify are (with perhaps the exception of the scientific imagination) the same as those employed in the original discovery; and the results can only be truly accepted, embraced, stored away among our intellectual possessions, after and as a consequence of such verification. The same, it would appear, must be admitted in the case of ethical and philosophic truths. These are wrought out, meditated, harmonised, by patient thinkers, and are then laid before the mass of intelligent men for examination and acceptance;

and only in as far as they are thus examined and rethought (so to speak)-only, that is, in as far and when they have been subjected, in the minds of those to whom they are brought, to precisely the same operations as they had undergone (and as they originally sprang from) in the minds of the bringers can they be regarded as discovered, or established, or qualified to take their rank as acquisitions or registered items of our mental wealth. In the domain of human knowledge, therefore, it may probably safely be assumed that whatever we can receive and comprehend we can also ascertain and discover.

If matters of this character are revealed to us ab extra or by superior beings, such revelation is nothing more than anticipation—the helping and hastening of the prompter-the giving us in complete form what, left to ourselves, we should have arrived at piecemeal and more tardily--or the announcement to us in infancy of matters which in our maturer intelligence we should have made out for ourselves. Science has already ascertained a vast amount of truth as to the constitution and laws of motion in the solar system; has almost discovered the mode and order of its evolution out of chaos, and of the development (though not the origination) of life upon this globe ;-and these discoveries, as our instruments of observation and analysis are gradually perfected, will probably arrive at the stage of positive knowledge. If they had been announced to our ancestors long centuries ago, as a statement from without or from above,