eat themselves. There we are dependent
wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which
never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is
possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our
conjectures. It has been suggested, fancifully, that if we consider the
universe to be infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is
perpetually present. Light takes nine years to come to us from Sirius;
those rays which we may see to-night when we leave this place, left
Sirius nine years ago; and could the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth
at this moment, they would see the English army in the trenches before
Sebastopol; Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over the wounded at
Inkermann; and the peace of England undisturbed by 'Essays and Reviews.'

As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them, and there
may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping
into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that
older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them,
when the Baltic was an open sea.

Could we but compare notes, something might be done; but of this there
is no present hope, and without it there will be no science of history.
Eclipses, recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculation, and
lost dates can be recovered by them, and we can foresee by the laws
which they follow when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever
be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by
historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is
a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general
phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some
general phenomenon. Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are
large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have[A] _foretold_
such movements as those? The state of things out of which they rose is
obscure; but suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, with any
amount of historical insight into the old Oriental beliefs, you could
have seen that they were about to transform themselves into those
particular forms and no other?

It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can understand
partially how Mahometanism came to be. All historians worth the name
have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean
something with more ambitious pretences, w