charm thrown over the intellect, the death sentence breathed into the
conscience, to arrest man's progress towards truth, and bolster up the
worship of error.

The Code defines prescription thus: "The process of gaining and losing
through the lapse of time." In applying this definition to ideas and
beliefs, we may use the word PRESCRIPTION to denote the everlasting
prejudice in favor of old superstitions, whatever be their object; the
opposition, often furious and bloody, with which new light has always
been received, and which makes the sage a martyr. Not a principle, not a
discovery, not a generous thought but has met, at its entrance into the
world, with a formidable barrier of preconceived opinions, seeming
like a conspiracy of all old prejudices. Prescriptions against reason,
prescriptions against facts, prescriptions against every truth hitherto
unknown,--that is the sum and substance of the _statu quo_ philosophy,
the watchword of conservatives throughout the centuries.

When the evangelical reform was broached to the world, there was
prescription in favor of violence, debauchery, and selfishness; when
Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and their disciples reconstructed philosophy
and the sciences, there was prescription in favor of the Aristotelian
philosophy; when our fathers of '89 demanded liberty and equality, there
was prescription in favor of tyranny and privilege. "There always have
been proprietors and there always will be:" it is with this profound
utterance, the final effort of selfishness dying in its last ditch,
that the friends of social inequality hope to repel the attacks of their
adversaries; thinking undoubtedly that ideas, like property, can be lost
by prescription.

Enlightened to-day by the triumphal march of science, taught by the most
glorious successes to question our own opinions, we receive with favor
and applause the observer of Nature, who, by a thousand experiments
based upon the most profound analysis, pursues a new principle, a law
hitherto undiscovered. We take care to repel no idea, no fact, under the
pretext that abler men than ourselves lived in former days, who did not
notice the same phenomena, nor grasp the same analogies. Why do we not
preserve a like attitude towards political and philosophical questions?
Why this ridiculous mania for affirming that every thing has been said,
which means that we know all about mental and moral science? Why is
the proverb, THERE IS NOTHING NEW U