ere, sometime, it will
demand and find compensation for that loss, by doing the work itself.
Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known.
The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts
indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see
the necessary reason of every fact,--see how it could and must be. So
stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke,
before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of
Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and
a Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal
Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like
influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; and we
aim to master intellectually the steps and reach the same height or the
same degradation that our fellow, our proxy has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the
excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the
desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and
introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures
in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end
of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has
satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a
person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself
should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along
the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through
them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by
us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply
ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the
place and state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the
first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it
as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to wood
by carving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of a
cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added thereto the
Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints'
days and image-worship, we have as it were been the man that made the
minster; we have seen how it coul