To the superficial it may seem surprising that literature, as distinct from poetry, should commence with the most subtle and laborious direction of the human intellect: yet so it was, not only in Greece, but almost universally.

In nearly all countries, speculative conjecture or inquiry is the first successor to poetry.

In India, in China, in the East, some dim philosophy is the characteristic of the earliest works--sometimes inculcating maxims of morality--sometimes allegorically shadowing forth, sometimes even plainly expressing, the opinions of the author on the mysteries of life--of nature--of the creation.

Even with the moderns, the dawn of letters broke on the torpor of the dark ages of the North in speculative disquisition; the Arabian and the Aristotelian subtleties engaged the attention of the earliest cultivators of modern prose (as separated from poetic fiction), and the first instinct of the awakened reason was to grope through the misty twilight after TRUTH.

Philosophy precedes even history; men were desirous of solving the enigmas of the world, before they disentangled from tradition the chronicles of its former habitants.
If we examine the ways of an infant we shall cease to wonder at those of an infant civilization.