particle is enough to throw the search aside, and the most minute
circumstance sufficient to conceal obvious and brilliantly shining truths.
One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for the first star to
appear, knowing the position of the brightest in the southern sky. The dusk
came on, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By-and-by, other stars
less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset which obscured the
expected one. Finally, I considered that I must have mistaken its position,
when suddenly a puff of air blew through the branch of a pear-tree which
overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there was the star behind the leaf.

At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing at
the sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star
shines clearly; here a constellation is hidden by a branch; a
universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organon is
required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may
be removed and a real void; when to cease to look in one direction, and to
work in another. Many men of broad brow and great intellect lived in the
days of ancient Greece, but for lack of the accident of a lens, and of
knowing the way to use a prism, they could but conjecture imperfectly. I am
in exactly the position they were when I look beyond light. Outside my
present knowledge I am exactly in their condition. I feel that there are
infinities to be known, but they are hidden by
a leaf. If any one says to himself that the telescope, and the microscope,
the prism, and other discoveries have made all plain, then he is in the
attitude of those ancient priests who worshipped the scarabaeus or beetle.
So, too, it is with thought; outside our present circle of ideas I believe
there is an infinity of idea. All this that has been effected with light
has been done by bits of glass--mere bits of shaped glass, quickly broken,
and made of flint, so that by the rude flint our subtlest ideas are gained.
Could we employ the ocean as a lens, and force truth from the sky, even then