This gloss quotes, for the explanation of
obsolete words, a number of more ancient compositions; and these
compositions, therefore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth
century, have been still in existence. Nothing can be sounder; every
step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along. O'Curry thus
affords a good specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much wanted
in Celtic researches, and so little practised by Edward Davies and
his brethren; and to found this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he
sets in his own department of philology, has mainly contributed.
Science's reconciling power, too, on which I have already touched,
philology, in her Celtic researches, again and again illustrates.
Races and languages have been absurdly joined, and unity has been
often rashly assumed at stages where one was far, very far, from
having yet really reached unity. Science has and will long have to
be a divider and a separatist, breaking arbitrary and fanciful
connections, and dissipating dreams of a premature and impossible
unity. Still, science,--true science,--recognises in the bottom of
her soul a law of ultimate fusion, of conciliation. To reach this,
but to reach it legitimately, she tends. She draws, for instance,
towards the same idea which fills her elder and diviner sister,
poetry,--the idea of the substantial unity of man; though she draws
towards it by roads of her own.
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