; we need light--the Sun casts shadows--I will begin by
blotting out the Sun; then the world will be full of glory--the light of my
genius."

In striking contrast with that three-fold division of Folly, the counsel
of Wisdom is one, and it is one with the sober counsel of Common Sense.
What is that counsel? What is the united counsel of wisdom and common
sense respecting the past? The answer is easy and easy to understand. The
counsel is this: Do not ignore the past but study it--study it diligently
as being the mightiest factor among the great factors of our human world;
endeavor to view the past justly, to contemplate it as it was and is, to
see it _whole_--to see it in true perspective--magnifying neither its good
nor its evil, neither its knowledge nor its ignorance, neither its
enterprise nor its slothfulness, neither its achievements nor its
failures; as the salient facts are ascertained, endeavor to account for
them, to find their causes, their favoring conditions, to explain the
facts to understand them, applying always the question _Why?_ Centuries of
centuries of cruel superstition--Why? Centuries of centuries of almost
complete ignorance of natural law--Why? Centuries of centuries of monstrous
misconceptions of human nature--Why? Measureless creations, wastings and
destructions of wealth--Why? Endless rolling cycles of enterprise,
stagnation, and decay--Why? Interminable alterations of peace and war,
enslavements and emancipations--Why? Age after age of world-wide worship of
man-made gods, silly, savage, enthroned by myth and magic, celebrated and
supported by poetry and the wayward speculations of ignorant "sages"--Why?
Age upon age of world-wide slow developments of useful inventions,
craftsmanship, commerce, and art--Why? Ages of dark impulsive groping
before the slow discovery of reason, followed by centuries of belief in
the sufficiency of ratiocination unaided by systematic observation and
experiment--Why? At length the dawn of scientific method and science, the
growth of natural knowledge, immeasurable expansion of the universe _in
Time_ and _in Space_, belief in the lawfulness of Nature, rapidly
increasing subjugation of natural forces to human control, growing faith
in the limitless progressibility of human knowledge and in the limitless
perfectibility of human welfare--Why? The widely diverse peoples of the
world constrained by scientific progress to live together as in one
community upon a greatly s