Do we of the nineteenth century, then, always
strike out boldly into the unlandmarked deep of speculation and shape our
courses by the stars, or do we not sometimes con our voyage by what seem
to us the firm and familiar headlands of truth, planted by God himself,
but which may, after all, be no more than an insubstantial mockery of
cloud or airy juggle of mirage? The refraction of our own atmosphere has
by no means made an end of its tricks with the appearances of things in
our little world of thought. The men of that day believed what they saw,
or, as our generation would put it, what they _thought_ they saw. Very
good. The vast majority of men believe, and always will believe, on the
same terms. When one comes along who can partly distinguish the thing
seen from that travesty or distortion of it which the thousand disturbing
influences within him and without him would _make_ him see, we call him a
great philosopher. All our intellectual charts are engraved according to
his observations, and we steer contentedly by them till some man whose
brain rests on a still more unmovable basis corrects them still further
by eliminating what his predecessor thought _he_ saw. We must account for
many former aberrations in the moral world by the presence of more or
less nebulous bodies of a certain gravity which modified the actual
position of truth in its relation to the mind, and which, if they have
now vanished, have made way, perhaps, for others whose influence will in
like manner be allowed for by posterity in their estimate of us.
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