On the contrary, the larger the collection of seemingly heterogeneous facts we can bring under the rule of a single formula, the nearer we feel that we have reached towards the source of knowledge, and the more perfectly we trace the little arc of the immeasurable circle which comes within the range of our hasty observations, at first like the broken fragments of a many-sided polygon, but at last as a simple curve which encloses all we know, or can know, of nature.  To our own intellectual wealth, the gain is like that of the over-burdened traveller, who should exchange hundred-weights of iron for ounces of gold.  Evanescent, formless, unstable, impalpable, a fog of uncondensed experiences hovers over our consciousness like an atmosphere of uncombined gases.  One spark of genius shoots through it, and its elements rush together and glitter before us in a single translucent drop.  It would hardly be extravagant to call Science the art of packing knowledge.

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=_John William Draper,[52] 1810-._=

From the “Human Physiology.”

=_215._= TRUTHS IN THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHIES.

It is not my intention to enter on an examination, or even enumeration, of ancient philosophical opinions, nor to show that many of the doctrines which have been brought forward within the last three centuries existed in embryo in those times.  It may, however, be observed that, in the midst of much error, there were those who held just views of the various problems of theology, law, politics, philosophy, and particularly of the fundamental doctrines of natural science, the constitution of the solar system, the geological history of the earth, the nature of chemical forces, the physiological relations of animals and plants.

It is supposed by many, whose attention has been casually drawn to the philosophical opinions of antiquity, that the doctrines which we still retain as true came to the knowledge of the old philosophers, not so much by processes of legitimate investigation as by mere guessing or crude speculation, for which there was an equal chance whether they were right or wrong; but a closer examination will show that many of them must have depended on results previously determined or observed by the Africans or Asiatics, and thus they seem to indicate that the human mind has undergone in twenty centuries but little change in its manner of action, and that, commencing with the same data, it always comes to the same conclusions.  Nor is this at all dependent on any inherent logic of truth.  Very many of the errors of antiquity have re-appeared in our times.  If the Greek schools were infected with materialism, pantheism, and atheism, the later progress of philosophy has shown the same characters.  To a certain extent, such doctrines will receive an impression from the prevailing creeds, but the arguments which have been appealed to in their favor have always been the same.  The distinction