Bright potentates, set proudly in the sky."
Or when we sail upon a sea made solemn by its vastness, dying in far distance, with no boundary except itself, as each swelling wave rises against the sky. We ask it, on some stately mountain top looking down over light and shadow,—over the rest and the motion of the landscape. More earnestly still, perhaps, while from the depth of a twilight valley we admire the sunset lingering upon inapproachable alpine snows;—rosy heights unveiling their loveliness, yet soon to be hidden till the Light of this lower world shall shine afresh amongst their clefts and pinnacles.
And who is not in earnest, as sunset and sunrise remind him how the majestic clock of Time moves on? Yonder glorious luminary has warmed with form and life countless organisms, scattered over mountain summits, in ocean depths, through wild savannahs and forests;—organisms throughout regions of earth, water, air, so remote and inaccessible that their wonderful excellence of beauty has never been beheld by Man's perishable eye. Knowing, as we cannot but know, how soon our own eyelids must close beneath the sun, we yearn within our soul, longing for a truer insight into the great Universe above and beyond us; and for a firmer feeling that we ourselves are an imperishable part of it. Somewhere in this Universe, must surely be contained things brighter and better than those we now possess. Else, why is it clothed so lavishly with half-revealed charms, adapted to touch our most delicate sympathies, to win us from our worse selves, and allure us on like willing captives to its loveliness? Awakened in our senses, awakened in our souls, we desire to know, to feel, and to attain;—these three impulses become our fixed and enduring aspirations.
But, how? We all remember that Undine sought a soul and found a sorrow;—a sorrow the more intolerable, because through its burden she first realized her hard-earned dower of coveted immortality. Yet, as she truly says, every creature cannot but strive after that which is naturally higher than itself.
One secret of progress we soon discover. What Nature can give us depends on what she can tell us. And here is a prevailing motive for the endeavour to unclose fair Nature's book.
Another step in thought is early taken in our day, though the civilized world was slow in reaching it. We soon perceive that Nature's answers must catch their tone and compass from our interrogations. In numerous sciences, this axiom carries the whole theory and practice of experiment;—that grand distinction between Bacon's inductive process, and the induction of the ancient world. In other walks of inquiry, intellectual and moral, the same truth has grown up and blossomed with a ruling idea of the crucial or prerogative question: slow in being framed, and difficult often in the asking, but, when asked, certain to elicit a reply.
A third postulate is also quickly apparent. Our inquiries must be subject, for utility's sake, to our power of assimilating knowledge. And thus our faculty for asking questions is governed by our faculties for apprehending answers.
The last and paramount requirement is forced upon us. Beyond and over all, comes the pressure of our own need and private anxiety. There are many truths which we discern afar off, like features of a smiling land of promise; and, knowing that they must become one day the heritage of mankind, we tend towards them without haste, yet without forgetfulness, and in this temper of mind wait contentedly. But, there are some truths for which we cannot afford to wait. They concern our destinies too closely; they are too near our hearts; too influential on our lives and happiness.
The old question asked in the youth of human philosophy, is the one we all begin by asking in our first confidence and eagerness of pursuit. Ask it in what words we may, it always comes to much the same thing; and if we could answer it, we should answer all questions in one. For, though we clothe our query with various shapes, and seldom put it in the form following, its true meaning is, "what are the realities of the Universe, and what the essential ground of all we see and think?"