Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/231

RhPROP. VII.———— "man the measure of the universe." In this superstition the savage and the savan fraternise (bear witness, mesmerism, with all thy frightful follies!)—and, drunk with this idolatry, they seek for truth at the shrine of the far-off and the uncommon; not knowing that her ancient altars, invisible because continually beheld, rise close at hand, and stand on beaten ways. Well has the poet said,

But, dead to the sense of these inspired words, we make no effort to shake off the drowsing influence, or to rescue our souls from the acquiescent torpor, which they denounce—no struggle to behold that which we lose sight off, only because we behold it too much, or to penetrate the heart of a secret which escapes us only by being too glaringly revealed. Instead of striving, as we ought, to render ourselves strange to the familiar, we strive, on the contrary, to render ourselves familiar with the strange. Hence our better genius is overpowered; and we are given over to a delirium, which we mistake for wisdom. Hence we are the slaves of mechanism, the inheritors and transmitters of privileged error; the bondsmen of convention, and not the free and deep-seeing children of reason. Hence we remain insensible to the true grandeurs and the sublimer wonders of Providence; for, is it to be conceived