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“I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day, as if there was some association between an internal approach to greater light and purity and the kindler of this dark lantern of our external existence.

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“The night is also a religious concern, and even more so when I viewed the moon and stars through Herschell’s telescope, and saw that they were worlds.

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“If, according to some speculations, you could prove the world many thousand years older than the Mosaic chronology, or if you could get rid of Adam and Eve, and the apple, and serpent, still, what is to be put up in their stead? or how is the difficulty removed?  Things must have had a beginning, and what matters it when or how?

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“I sometimes think that man may be the relic of some higher material being wrecked in a former world, and degenerated in the hardship and struggle through chaos into conformity, or something like it,—­as we see Laplanders, Esquimaux, &c. inferior in the present state, as the elements become more inexorable.  But even then this higher pre-Adamite supposititious creation must have had an origin and a Creator—­for a creation is a more natural imagination than a fortuitous concourse of atoms:  all things remount to a fountain, though they may flow to an ocean.

* * * * *

“Plutarch says, in his Life of Lysander, that Aristotle observes ’that in general great geniuses are of a melancholy turn, and instances Socrates, Plato, and Hercules (or Heraclitus), as examples, and Lysander, though not while young, yet as inclined to it when approaching towards age.’  Whether I am a genius or not, I have been called such by my friends as well as enemies, and in more countries and languages than one, and also within a no very long period of existence.  Of my genius, I can say nothing, but of my melancholy, that it is ‘increasing, and ought to be diminished.’  But how?

“I take it that most men are so at bottom, but that it is only remarked in the remarkable.  The Duchesse de Broglio, in reply to a remark of mine on the errors of clever people, said that ’they were not worse than others, only, being more in view, more noted, especially in all that could reduce them to the rest, or raise the rest to them.’  In 1816, this was.

“In fact (I suppose that) if the follies of fools were all set down like those of the wise, the wise (who seem at present only a better sort of fools) would appear almost intelligent.

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