Page:Tennyson - Walter Irving (1873).djvu/15

 beyond philosophy, which man craves for, and feels he is capable of attaining to. It is his after life, to which all the circumstances by which he is here surrounded point. Compared with this, what matters it whether the brain is merely a muscular power capable of receiving impressions, and able to compare and reflect upon them, whether an impression is self or not self, whether conscience is a misnomer for moral rectitude, seeing that men without consciences have no moral sense, no knowledge of good and evil, whether mind as a power is extraneous to brain, whether the soul—the life that was breathed into man at the first—does develope and progress until perfection is reached, and whether or not mind, which we know can and does decay, will exist hereafter with that which we are led to believe influences it in its present state, but never will decay? There is no safety in knowing all these things. Faust, who had learned "all that philosophy can teach," found that it did not show the road to happiness. He sought it wrongfully, in a fearful pathway, on which no sunshine ever falls, lost footing, as the Poet Laureate would say, and fell beneath himself. A string of vain conceits lifts the philosopher from off his feet, and makes him cut such foolish capers, that men perforce are moved to pity. All his journeyings are contained within his own brain, but conceit is such a powerful magnifying glass, that it makes it appear as if they reached to heaven. Philosophy, like an artificial light, only serves to show the darkness by which we are surrounded. Philosophers, like moles, are continually working in the dark, and all their efforts are overturned by the ploughshare of Time:—