y awakened by periodical remorse. He that thus
breaks his life into parts, will find in himself a desire to distinguish
every stage of his existence by some improvement, and delight himself
with the approach of the day of recollection, as of the time which is to
begin a new series of virtue and felicity.

No. 156. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1751.

_Nunquam aliud Natura, aliud Sapientia dicit_. Juv. Sat. xiv. 321.

For Wisdom ever echoes Nature's voice.

Every government, say the politicians, is perpetually degenerating
towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by
the resuscitation of its first principles, and the re-establishment of
its original constitution. Every animal body, according to the methodick
physicians, is, by the predominance of some exuberant quality,
continually declining towards disease and death, which must be obviated
by a seasonable reduction of the peccant humour to the just equipoise
which health requires.

In the same manner the studies of mankind, all at least which, not being
subject to rigorous demonstration, admit the influence of fancy and
caprice, are perpetually tending to errour and confusion. Of the great
principles of truth which the first speculatists discovered, the
simplicity is embarrassed by ambitious additions, or the evidence
obscured by inaccurate argumentation; and as they descend from one
succession of writers to another, like light transmitted from room to
room, they lose their strength and splendour, and fade at last in total
evanescence.

The systems of learning therefore must be sometimes reviewed,
complications analyzed into principles, and knowledge disentangled from
opinion. It is not always possible, without a close inspection, to
separate the genuine shoots of consequential reasoning, which grow out
of some radical postulate, from the branches which art has ingrafted on
it. The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured
them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those
rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be
discovered.

Criticism has sometimes permitted fancy to dictate the laws by which
fancy ought to be restrained, and fallacy to perplex the principles by
which fallacy is to be detected; her superintendence of others has
betrayed her to negligence of herself; and, like the ancient Scythians,
by extending her conquests over distant regions, she has left