lls, beholds
the universe melting away like vapor over the vacant immensity of
the Being in which he hopes for absorption. In this case the best of
teachings would be a journey in India; but, for lack of a better
one, take the narratives of travelers along with works in geography,
botany, and ethnology. In any event, there must be the same research.
A language, a law, a creed, is never other than an abstraction; the
perfect thing is found in the active man, the visible corporeal figure
which eats, walks, fights, and labors. Set aside the theories of
constitutions and their results, of religions and their systems, and
try to observe men in their workshops or offices, in their fields
along with their own sky and soil, with their own homes, clothes,
occupations and repasts, just as you see them when, on landing in
England or in Italy, you remark their features and gestures, their
roads and their inns, the citizen on his promenades and the workman
taking a drink. Let us strive as much as possible to supply the
place of the actual, personal, sensible observation that is no longer
practicable, this being the only way in which we can really know the
man; let us make the past present; to judge of an object it must be
present; no experience can be had of what is absent. Undoubtedly, this
sort of reconstruction is always imperfect; only an imperfect
judgment can be based on it; but let us do the best we can; incomplete
knowledge is better than none at all, or than knowledge which
is erroneous, and there is no other way of obtaining knowledge
approximatively of bygone times than by _seeing_ approximatively the
men of former times.

Such is the first step in history. This step was taken in Europe at
the end of the last century when the imagination took fresh flight
under the auspices of Lessing and Walter Scott, and a little later in
France under Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and others. We
now come to the second step.

II

On observing the visible man with your own eyes what do you try to
find in him? The invisible man. These words which your ears catch,
those gestures, those airs of the head, his attire and sensible
operations of all kinds, are, for you, merely so many expressions;
these express something, a soul. An inward man is hidden beneath the
outward man, and the latter simply manifests the former. You have
observed the house in which he lives, his furniture, his costume, in
order to discover his