Floating the Sea of Ignorance

The Universe of Facts is fixed by this creaking, leaky bark of flesh, floating wherever the primordial breeze and the immortal wave will take it; but feeling this motion, and the sights, sometimes novel, by which it takes us, and exhilarated by the dramatic sea spray of life, we're puffed up with visions of our Mast of Logic which holds up the Sail of Reason catching the breeze of Truth, with enlightened self-interest at the Rudder; but this stupendous scene, upon which society today depends, is a dream as fanciful as it is entrancing, holding our peculiar civilization together under its fecund spell; and the difference between this somnambulist civilization and those many of the past, what lifts us up out of the sad patterns of history up into tragedy, is only that we know enough to know better.