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As if to give the finishing touches to this novel scheme of cosmology, Herschel, though in the main very little given to unsustained theorizing, allows himself the privilege of one belief that he cannot call upon his telescope to substantiate. He thinks that all the myriad suns of his numberless systems are instinct with life in the human sense.
We allow in others the right of private judgment, and confess that we, as others, are fallible men. We confess facts are against us; we do but claim the liberty of theorizing in spite of them. Far be it from us to say that we are certainly right; we only say that the whole early Church was certainly wrong.
What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature of a very high grade and very true instincts is dwarfed of full development and stunted of full results by the theorizing literary bent which he has in common with his time and people.
In the belief that he had found the missing link he planned, toward the end of 1792, a treatise to be known as 'Kallias, or Concerning Beauty'. It was to take the form of a dialogue, to be written in a pleasing style, with a plenty of illustration, merits to which Kant could lay no claim, and to review the whole history of aesthetic theorizing.
Even at the dimensions to which our theorizing has here grown, we may for instance discern the possible alternative of a simultaneous or rhythmically successive generation and destruction of vortex-atoms which would go far to modify the conclusion just suggested.
It is magnificent in theory, but it is a mere gas-bubble in the face of existing conditions. It is majestic, but sterile. Then where is the answer to the riddle of the world? Who knows? Who will ever know? Let us waste no more time in this darkness, which idle theorizing will not dispel; let us return to facts, humble facts, the only ground that does not give way under our feet.
Perhaps a couple of instances, drawn from strangely diverse sources, will bring this more vividly before the mind than any amount of attempted theorizing. The first is one of the tricks of the jugglers of the period. "To make one danse naked. The second illustration must have demanded, if possible, more credulity on the part of the audience than this harmless entertainment.
When all the discussing and theorizing in the world is done, it comes down to this: a servant in my house shall do AS I SAY. I have told her that I dislike this ridiculous club idea, and I expect to hear no more of the matter!" There came a day in December when Mrs. Salisbury came home from the Forum Club in mid-afternoon. Her face was a little pale as she entered the house, her lips tightly set.
For all my theorizing about the "survival of the fittest" and the "dying off of the weaklings," I could not help feeling that, in an abstract way, the socialists were not altogether wrong. I must confess, too, that the defeat with which I had met at Tevkin's house had greatly intensified my hostility to socialists.
So apt and patient are the Germans in research, that they have been justly said to "quarry" out the past; while so native are rhetoric, theorizing, and fancifulness to the French, that they make history, as they do life and government, theatrical and picturesque, rather than gravely real and practically suggestive.
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