Page:Aphorisms — an address delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, November 11, 1887.djvu/22

 apt to pitch criticism of life in the high poetic key. They have felt with Wordsworth:—

Then again, there is another cause for the passing eclipse of interest in wisdom of the world. Extraordinary advances have been made in ordered knowledge of the various stages of the long præ-historic dawn of human civilisation. The man of the flint implement and the fire-drill, who could only count up to five, and who was content to live in a hut like a bee-hive, has drawn interest away from the man of the market and the parlour. The literary passion for primitive times and the raw material of man has thrust polished man, the manufactured article, into a secondary place. All this is