But does such diversity disprove a fundamental unity?  All modern science answers, No.  How much of outward resemblance is there between a fish and a philosopher?  Is not the difference here as wide as the widest unlikenesses in human belief?  Yet Comparative Anatomy, with none to deny its right, includes philosopher and fish in one category:  they both belong to the vertebrate sub-kingdom.  See what vast dissimilarities are included in the unity of this vertebrate structure:  creatures that swim, creep, walk, fly; creatures with two feet, with four feet, with no feet, with feet and hands, with hands only, with neither feet nor hands; creatures that live in air only, or in water only, or that die at once in water or air; creatures, in fine, more various and diverse than imagination, before the fact, could conceive.  Yet, throughout this astonishing, inconceivable variety, science walks in steady perception of a unity extending far toward details of structure.  The boor laughs, when told that the forefoot of his horse and his own hand are essentially the same member.  A “Positive Philosopher” laughs, when told that through Fetichism and Lutheranism there runs a thread of unity,—­that human belief has its law, and may be studied in the spirit of science.  But it is more than questionable whether the laugh is on their side.[A]

[Footnote A:  Comte did, indeed, profess to furnish a central law of belief.  It is due, he said, to the tendency of man to flatter his own personality by foisting its image upon the universe.  This, however, is but one way of saying that it is wholly gratuitous,—­that it has no root in the truth of the world.  But universal truth and universal law are the same; and therefore that which arises without having any root in eternal verity is lawless in the deepest possible sense,—­lawless not merely as being irregular in its action, but in the deeper and more terrible sense of being in the universe without belonging there.  To believe, however, that any product of universal dimensions can be generated, not by the truth of the universe, but by somewhat else, is to believe in a Devil more thoroughly than the creed of any Calvinist allows.  But this is quite in character.  Comte was perhaps the most superstitious man of his time; superstition runs in the blood of his “philosophy”; and Mr. Buckle, in my opinion, escapes and denounces the black superstitions of ignorance only to fall into the whited superstitions of sciolism.]

But our author does not quit this subject without attempting to adduce a specific instance wherein consciousness proves fallacious.  Success, however, could hardly be worse; he fails to establish his point, but succeeds in discrediting either his candor or his discrimination.  “Are we not,” he says, “in certain circumstances, conscious of the existence of spectres and phantoms; and yet is it not generally admitted that such beings have no existence at all?” Now I should be ashamed to charge a scholar, like