and, therefore, wherever the Age can establish itself in sufficient power and consistency, it sets up this maxim as its scientific principle, and by it estimates and judges every acquisition of knowledge. But it cannot fail that others, not so entirely under the rule of the prevailing spirit, but without having yet descried the morning-dawn of the new Age, must feel the infinite emptiness and platitude of such a maxim; and then, imagining that to get at the True we have only to reverse the False, are disposed to place all wisdom in the Incomprehensible and the Unintelligible. But since these too, with their whole mode of thinking, arise out of the Age, and are nothing but its reaction against itself; so, notwithstanding the antagonism of their principles, they as well as the others are products of the Age, and under other conditions would have been but the residue of a former Time; and he who would comprehend the Knowledge of the Age, must bring forward and investigate both principles:—as we shall do.
There is now only one more general remark with which I must preface our delineation, namely, the following:—Whether that which we call the Third Age is precisely our own, and whether the phenomena which I shall derive by strict deduction from the principle of this Age, are those which now exist before our eyes;—on this point I have more than once said I leave you to form your own judgment. But in case any one should desire to pass such a judgment, it is necessary to guard him against such reasoning as the following:—‘Well, suppose that it cannot be denied that this is the case at present, yet it is by no means a feature peculiar to our Age, but may always have been so.’ With this view, when speaking of any phenomena of which this might by possibility be said, I shall call to your recollection Ages in which it was otherwise than it is now.
