Literary industries - 1890 Author:Hubert Howe Bancroft Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SPRINGS AOT) LITTLE BROOKS. On fait presque toujours les grandes choses sans savoir comment on lea fait, et on est tout surpria qu'on lea a fa... more »ites. Demandez a Cesar comment il se rendit le maitrc du monde; pent-etre ne vous repoudra-t-il pas aiseuicut. Fontenelle. Sermonize as we may on fields and atmospheres, internal agencies and environment, at the end of life we know little more of the influences that moulded us than at the beginning. Without rudder or compass our bark is sent forth on the stormy sea, and although we fancy we know our present haven, the trackless path by which we came hither we cannot retrace. The record of a life written—what is it? Between the lines are characters invisible which might tell us something could we translate them. They might tell us something of those ancient riddles, origin and destiny, free-will and necessity, discussed under various names by learned men through the centuries, and all without having penetrated one hair's breadth into the mystery, all without having gained any knowledge of the subject not possessed by men primeval. In this mighty and universal straining to fathom the unknowable, Plato, the philosophic Greek, seems to succeed no better than Moncacht Ape', the philosophic savage. This much progress, however, has been made; there are men now living who admit that they know nothing about such matters; that after a lifetime of study and meditation the eyes of the brightest intellect can see beyond the sky no farther than those of ORIGIN AND DESTINY. 43 the most unlearned dolt. And they are the strongest who acknowledge their weakness in this regard; they are the wisest who confess their ignorance. Even the ancients understood this, though by the mouth of Tcrentius they put the proposition a little ...« less