Already therefore a certain progress of the human species is inseparable from the progress of Time, as far as man is included in the family of Time and Earth. Were the progenitor of mankind now to appear, and view his descendants, how would he be astonished! His body was formed for a youthful Earth; his frame, his ideas, and his way of life, must have been adapted to that constitution of the elements, which then prevailed; and considerable alteration in this must have taken place, in the course of six thousand years or upwards. In many parts America is no longer what it was when discovered: two thousand years hence, its ancient history will have the air of romance. Thus we read the history of the siege of Troy, and seek in vain the spot where it stood; in vain the grave of Achilles, or the godlike hero himself. Were a collection of all the accounts, that have been given of the size and figure of the ancients, of the kind and quantity of their food, of their daily occupations and amusements, and of their notions of love and marriage, the virtues and the passions, the purpose of life and a future existence, made with discriminating accuracy, and with regard to time and place, it would be of no small advantage toward a history of man. Even in this short period, an advancement of the species would be sufficiently conspicuous to evince both the consistency of ever-youthful Nature, and the progressive changes of our old mother Earth. Earth nurses not man alone: she presses all her children to one bosom, embraces all in the same maternal arms: and, when one changes, all must undergo change.
It is undeniable, too, that this progress of time has influenced the mode of thinking of the human species. Bid a man now invent, now sing an Iliad; bid him write like Æschylus, like Sophocles, like Plato: it is impossible. The childish simplicity, the unprejudiced mode of seeing things, in short the youthful period of the Greeks, is gone by. It is the same with the Hebrews, and the Romans; while on the other hand we are acquainted with a number of things, of which both the Romans and the Hebrews were ignorant. One day teaches another, one century instructs another century: tradition is enriched: the muse of Time, History, herself sings with a hundred voices, speaks with a hundred tongues. Be there as much filth, as much confusion, as there will, in the vast snowball rolled up by Time; yet this very confusion is the offspring of ages, which could have arisen only from the unwearied rolling on of one and the same thing. Thus every return to the ancient times, even the celebrated year of Plato, is a fiction, is, from the ideas of the World and of Time, an impossibility. We float onward: but the stream that has once flowed, returns no more to its source.
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