terialism, it fled
to magic, to explain the ever-astounding miracle of life.

The old Regime. Will our age, in its turn, ever be spoken of as an old
Regime? Will it ever be spoken of as a Regime at all; as an organised,
orderly system of society and polity; and not merely as a chaos, an
anarchy, a transitory struggle, of which the money-lender has been the
real guide and lord?

But at least it will be spoken of as an age of progress, of rapid
developments, of astonishing discoveries.

Are you so sure of that? There was an age of progress once. But what is
our age--what is all which has befallen since 1815--save after-swells of
that great storm, which are weakening and lulling into heavy calm? Are
we on the eve of stagnation? Of a long check to the human intellect? Of
a new Byzantine era, in which little men will discuss, and ape, the deeds
which great men did in their forefathers' days?

What progress--it is a question which some will receive with almost angry
surprise--what progress has the human mind made since 1815?

If the thought be startling, do me the great honour of taking it home,
and verifying for yourselves its truth or its falsehood. I do not say
that it is altogether true. No proposition concerning human things,
stated so broadly, can be. But see for yourselves, whether it is not at
least more true than false; whether the ideas, the discoveries, of which
we boast most in the nineteenth century, are not really due to the end of
the eighteenth. Whether other men did not labour, and we have only
entered into their labours. Whether our positivist spirit, our content
with the collecting of facts, our dread of vast theories, is not a
symptom--wholesome, prudent, modest, but still a symptom--of our
consciousness that we are not as our grandfathers were; that we can no
longer conceive great ideas, which illumine, for good or evil, the whole
mind and heart of man, and drive him on to dare and suffer desperately.

Railroads? Electric telegraphs? All honour to them in their place: but
they are not progress; they are only the fruits of past progress. No
outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it
merely spreads and makes popular the results of progress. Progress is
inward, of the soul. And, therefore, improved constitutions, and
improved book instruction--now miscalled education--are not progress:
they are at best only fruits and signs thereof. For they are outward,