You are required to assign some principle of motion such that it shall
revolve through the parts of a mechanism self-sustained. Suppose those
parts to be called by the names of our English alphabet, and to stand in
the order of our alphabet, then A is through B C D, etc., to pass down
with its total power upon Z, which reciprocally is to come round
undiminished upon A B C, etc., for ever. Never was a _nominal_
definition of what you want more simple and luminous. But coming to the
_real_ definition, and finding that every letter in succession must
still give something less than is received--that O, for instance, cannot
give to P all which it received from N--then no matter for the
triviality of the loss in each separate case, always it is gathering and
accumulating; your hands drop down in despair; you feel that a principle
of death pervades the machinery; retard it you may, but come it will at
last. And a proof remains behind, as your only result, that whilst the
nominal definition may sometimes run before the real definition for
ages, and yet finally be overtaken by it, in other cases the one flies
hopelessly before the pursuit of the other, defies it, and never _will_
be overtaken to the end of time.

That fate, that necessity, besieged the Grecian idea of immortality.
Rise from forgotten dust, my Plato; Stagyrite, stand up from the grave;
Anaxagoras, with thy bright, cloudless intellect that searched the
skies, Heraclitus, with thy gloomy, mysterious intellect that fathomed
the deeps, come forward and execute for me this demand. How shall that
immortality, which you give, which you _must_ give as a trophy of honour
to your Pantheon, sustain itself against the blights from those
humanities which also, by an equal necessity, starting from your basis,
give you must to that Pantheon? How will you prevent the sad reflux of
that tide which finally engulfs all things under any attempt to execute
the nominal idea of a Deity? You cannot do it. Weave your divinities in
that Grecian loom of yours, and no skill in the workmanship, nor care
that wisdom can devise, will ever cure the fatal flaws in the texture:
for the mortal taint lies not so much in your work as in the original
errors of your loom.

_IV. ON PAGAN SACRIFICES._

Ask any well-informed man at random what he supposes to have been done
with the sacrifices, he will answer that really he never thought about
it, but that naturally he supposes the flesh was bu