will be played on.

It is not, I say, unthinkable; but that is not the same thing as to
declare that life has no meaning beyond the sense it bears to human
intelligence. The intelligence itself rejects such a supposition; in my
case, with impatience and scorn. No theory of the world which ever came
to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the possibility of an
explanation which would set my mind at rest is to me inconceivable; no
whit the less am I convinced that there is a Reason of the All; one which
transcends my understanding, one no glimmer of which will ever touch my
apprehension; a Reason which must imply a creative power, and therefore,
even whilst a necessity of my thought, is by the same criticized into
nothing. A like antinomy with that which affects our conception of the
infinite in time and space. Whether the rational processes have reached
their final development, who shall say? Perhaps what seem to us the
impassable limits of thought are but the conditions of a yet early stage
in the history of man. Those who make them a proof of a "future state"
must necessarily suppose gradations in that futurity; does the savage,
scarce risen above the brute, enter upon the same "new life" as the man
of highest civilization? Such gropings of the mind certify our
ignorance; the strange thing is that they can be held by any one to
demonstrate that our ignorance is final knowledge.



XI.


Yet that, perhaps, will be the mind of coming man; if not the final
attainment of his intellectual progress, at all events a long period of