For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in
connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and none
can tell what will be after us. What opinions, what convictions, the
infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it live
out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold man
would undertake to conjecture. "The time will come," said Lichtenberg,
in scorn at the materializing tendencies of modern thought,--"the time
will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old
women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a
gas, and God will be a force." Mankind, if they last long enough on the
earth, may develop strange things out of themselves; and the growth of
what is called the Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on
Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years hence, or
seven hundred,--be the close of the mortal history of humanity as far
distant in the future as its shadowy beginnings seem now to lie behind
us,--this only we may foretell with confidence,--that the riddle of
man's nature will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which
physical laws will fail to explain,--that something, whatever it be, in
himself and in the world, which science cannot fathom, and which
suggests the unknown possibilities of his origin and his destiny. There
will remain yet

"Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things;
Falling from us, vanishing;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized;
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised."