the adjective ends by devouring the substantive; it seems that by dint of becoming slow the causes become superfluous.  A breath of reason upsets, like a house of cards, the structures of this erring and misnamed science.  Time has a relative meaning and value.  We reckon duration as long or short, by taking human life as our measure.  But they tell of insects which are born in the morning, arrive at mature age at mid-day, and only reach the evening if they are patriarchs of their race.  Is it not easy to conceive of beings organized for an existence such that our centuries would be moments with them, and centuries heaped together one of our hours?  Suppose one of these beings to be contemplating our geological periods, and slow causes will to him appear rapid causes, and the question of intelligence will be the same for him as for us.

It is manifest that the attempt is being made to restore the worship of the old Chronos, to whom the ancients had erected temples.  Let us look the idol in the face.  Time appears at first to our imagination as the great destroyer.  He is armed with a scythe, and passes gaunt and bald over the ruins of all that has lived.  When he lifts up his great voice and cries—­

     Mighty nations famed in story
       Into darkness I have hurled,—­
     Gone their myriads and their glory
       (Lo! ye follow) from the world: 
     My dark shade for ever covers
       Stars I quenched as on they rolled:—­

the beautiful, and frightened girl in the song is not singular as she exclaims in her terror: 

     Ah! we’re young, and we are lovers,
       Spare us, Reaper gaunt and old![128]

Such is the first impression which time makes upon us.  But birth succeeds to death.  From an inexhaustible spring, nature sends gushing forth new products and new developments.  Youth full of hope trips lightly over the ground, without a thought that the ground it treads on is the vast cemetery of all past generations.  If we fix our thoughts on the permanence of life and the manifestations of progress, time appears to us as the great producer.  Destroyer of all that is, producer of all that is to be, time has thus a double form.  It is a mysterious tide, ever rising and ever receding; it is the power of death, and it is the power of life.  All this, Gentlemen, is for the imagination.  In the view of a calm reason, time is the simply negative condition of all development, as space is the negative condition of all motion.  Just as without bodies and forces infinite space could not produce any motion; so, without the action of causes, ages heaped on ages could neither produce nor destroy a single atom of matter, or a single element of intelligence.  Time is the scene of life and of death; it neither causes to be born, nor to die.