statuesque forms are draped in the ancient flowing garments of centuries ago. Beyond, where the long line that stretches out before you must end, you recognise modern costume. Now you can discern their features. All have the same deep, earnest expression. Shadowy though they are, their eyes seem to pierce the mist with a searching, scrutinising gaze.

A

These are the shadows of minds that no longer exist. The shadows of the bodies that contained them were fleeting, passed away when the bodies ceased to be; but the shadows of the minds remain.

The shadow your mind casts, daily, hourly, will remain after you are gone. Your influence, your example, your words, do not float away upon the wind. They make their mark, like bullets. Some go true, some go askew, but all hit somewhere, and the mark remains. The shadow each human mind casts may be more or less faint, and may fade, and even become extinct after generations, but it is always there-one to each mind.

These are the shadows of minds which were much the same as yours is at this very moment. Like yours, they awakened in the world in dreamy wonder, came to complete consciousness by degrees, had much the same experiences, longed, struggled, responded to some influences, recoiled at others. But they were intense as the noonday sun. A thought did not brush them lightly, merely rippling their mind-surface and passing on; it was always like a match applied to a combustible, and lit a blaze of extraordinary proportions. If they looked at an object, they saw not merely the actual visible thing, as you or I would see it, but saw what it had been, what it might be, -every possible state of its past, present, and future being. Besides intensity, they possessed a subtle and intricate susceptibility. A look, a word, a sound would shake their whole delicate mind-construction to its very centre. Their life was one long series of shocks, the slight shocks being perhaps more refined torture than the great ones, those great incomprehensible agonies which were the primary reasons of their shrinking from the restless tumult outside themselves, and living within the border of their senses as in a cell.

These sufferings it was, that in most cases led to their passionate searchings after Truth. Their lofty souls, writhing under the torments inflicted by human imperfec

tions and miseries, were too noble to despair, and therefore spent themselves in the utterance of a great Why? And, in default of a reply from Anywhere in the vast Silence, they worked patiently and constantly to find one, searching along the universe by the dull flicker of their own. intelligences. For great though their intelligences were, they were mere faint sparks of light in the eternal Darkness; and it was hard, unthankful work examining Eternity step by step,-an inch of the ground at a time, as it were, and then coming to a sudden break where the ground stopped,—and there was nothing beyond but space, -just when they thought they were coming to the end.

The story of the Philosophers,-for those stern, still shadows are theirs,-is at its best a sad one. Great as their work was, it fell short of its object, and they lived and died, humiliated by failure.

Yonder is the first of whom there is any record. They called that old man with the flowing beard and kindly face that you can see far back in the distance, the Father of Philosophy. Thales was born, according to the ancient computation of time, in the first year of the 34th Olympiad (B.C. 640). He was one of the seven wise men of Greece. It would be interesting to know even the principal facts of the long contemplative life of ninety odd years; but mere fragments of tradition remain. We gather from the various authorities that Thales never married, giving the excuse to his mother, who pressed him to do so, first, that he was too young; then, that he was too old. Of his star-gazing, whether when "absent," deep in a train of thought, or when actually studying the heavens,—an anecdote is related. One night, when so occupied, he fell into a ditch, and was rallied by an old crone, who, jeering him, said, "O Thales! when you cannot discern what is at your feet, do you think to make discoveries in the heavens?"

That many such taunts beset his daily life can be believed. He was a man born before his time. His thoughts were, so to say, antedated, like those of half the great

thinkers, discoverers, and inventors of later ages. Until he lived, a set process of reasoning was unknown. He invented, or if he did not invent, he was the first to give to the world, the formula called the "deductive method." This process of reasoning was naturally crude and imperfect in the time of Thales. All know that the deductive method at its highest means arguing and proving from a given Cause or Principle to its various effects or consequences, instead of, as in the inductive and contrary way, reasoning and inferring step by step from the effect up to or back to its cause.

The first to discover or use the deductive reasoning, Thales was the first to suffer from its uncertainty. As he fell bodily into a ditch, his mental efforts suffered somewhat the same calamity. His great object in life was, as it was that of the Philosophers who followed him, to find the Cause or Beginning of things. This he felt convinced was one Law, Essence, or Principle, instead of being many, according to the religious opinions of his age and country. His deductive reasoning demanded hypothesis; and hypothesis (or self-generated idea) upon hypothesis he doubtless assumed and rejected, until he suddenly came upon one which he seized upon in triumph-the idea which is identified with his name, that the one Substance, Life, Power, or whatever he may have thought it, must be Water, or rather Moisture.

This bold presumption was supported in his mind by the fact that life and moisture seemed co-existent. Moisture nourished. Seeds were moist. Warmth he believed to proceed from moisture. He felt an active life or soul within him, which he believed to be renewed by the moisture of his frame, if it were not indeed identical with it. As his hypothesis became more firmly rooted in his mind, he declared that the very gods were generated by water or moisture, therefore boldly placing a First Cause above the gods and goddesses then believed in by the people, and in a dim sort of way indicating a belief in One only God.