Discussions as to which parts of speech were first formed, and the processes by which grammatical structure and inflections took their rise, appear in a great measure needless, after the matter has been placed in this light. The mental powers could readily connect particular arbitrary sounds with particular ideas, whether those ideas were nouns, verbs, or interjections. As the words of all languages can be traced back into roots which are monosyllables, we may presume these sounds to have all been monosyllabic accordingly. The clustering of two or more together to express a compound idea, and the formation of inflections by additional syllables expressive of pronouns and such prepositions as of, by, and to, are processes which would or might occur as matters of course, being simple results of a mental power called into action, and partly directed, by external necessities. This power, however, as we find it in very different degrees of endowment in individuals, so would it be in different degrees of endowment in nations, or branches of the human family. Hence we find the formation of words and the process of their composition and grammatical arrangement, in very different stages of development in different races. The Chinese have a language composed of a limited number of monosyllables, which they multiply in use by mere variations of accent, and which they have never yet attained the power of clustering or inflecting; the language of this immense nation—the third part of the human race— may be said to be in the condition of infancy. The aboriginal Americans, so inferior in civilization, have, on the other hand, a language of the most elaborately composite kind, perhaps even exceeding, in this respect, the languages of the most refined European nations. These are but a few out of many facts tending to shew that language is in a great measure independent of civilization, as far as its advance and development are concerned. Do they not also help to prove that cultivated intellect is not necessary for the origination of language?

Facts daily presented to our observation afford equally simple reasons for the almost infinite diversification of language. It is invariably found that, wherever society is at once dense and refined, language tends to be uniform throughout the whole population, and to undergo few changes in the course of time. Wherever, on the contrary, we have a scattered and barbarous people, we have great diversities, and comparatively rapid alterations of language. Insomuch that, while English, French, and German are each spoken with little variation by many millions, there are islands in the Indian archipelago, probably not inhabited by one million, but in which there are hundreds of languages, as diverse as are English, French, and German. It is easy to see how this should be. There are peculiarities in the vocal organization of every person, tending to produce peculiarities of pronunciation; for example, it has been stated that each child in a family of six gave the monosyllable, fly, in a different manner, (eye, fy, ly, &c.) until, when the organs were more advanced, correct example induced the proper pronunciation of this and similar words. Such departures from orthoepy are only to be checked by the power of such example; but this is a power not always present, or not always of sufficient strength. The able and self- devoted Robert Moffat, in his work on South Africa, states, without the least regard to hypothesis, that amongst the people of the towns of that great region, "the purity and harmony of language is kept up by their pitchos or public meetings, by their festivals and ceremonies, as well as by their songs and their constant intercourse. With the isolated villages of the desert it is far otherwise. They have no such meetings; they are compelled to traverse the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions, fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and those still farther advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, through the live-long day, BECOME HABITUATED TO A LANGUAGE OF THEIR OWN. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious, and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect composed of a host of mongrel words and phrases, joined together without rule, and IN THE COURSE OF A GENERATION THE ENTIRE CHARACTER OF THE LANGUAGE IS CHANGED." {317} I have been told, that in like manner the children of the Manchester factory workers, left for a great part of the day, in large assemblages, under the care of perhaps a single elderly person, and spending the time in amusements, are found to make a great deal of new language. I have seen children in other circumstances amuse themselves by concocting and throwing into the family circulation entirely new words; and I believe I am running little risk of contradiction when I say that there is scarcely a family, even amongst the middle classes of this country, who have not some peculiarities of pronunciation and syntax, which have originated amongst themselves, it is hardly possible to say how. All these things being considered, it is easy to understand how mankind have come at length to possess between three and four thousand languages, all different at least as much as French, German, and English, though, as has been shewn, the traces of a common origin are observable in them all.

What has been said on the question whether mankind were originally barbarous or civilized, will have prepared the reader for understanding how the arts and sciences, and the rudiments of civilization itself, took their rise amongst men. The only source of fallacious views on this subject is the so frequent observation of arts, sciences, and social modes, forms, and ideas, being not indigenous where we see them now flourishing, but known to have been derived elsewhere: thus Rome borrowed from Greece, Greece from Egypt, and Egypt itself, lost in the mists of historic antiquity, is now supposed to have obtained the light of knowledge from some still earlier scene of intellectual culture. This has caused to many a great difficulty in supposing a natural or spontaneous origin for civilization and the attendant arts. But, in the first place, several stages of derivation are no conclusive argument against there having been an originality at some earlier stage. In the second, such observers have not looked far enough, for, if they had, they could have seen various instances of civilizations which it is impossible, with any plausibility, to trace back to a common origin with others; such are those of China and America. They would also have seen civilization springing up, as it were, like oases amongst the arid plains of barbarism, as in the case of the Mandans. A still more attentive study of the subject would have shewn, amongst living men, the very psychological procedure on which the origination of civilization and the arts and sciences depended.

These things, like language, are simply the effects of the spontaneous working of certain mental faculties, each in relation to the things of the external world on which it was intended by creative Providence to be exercised. The monkeys themselves, without instruction from any quarter, learn to use sticks in fighting, and some build houses—an act which cannot in their case be considered as one of instinct, but of intelligence. Such being the case, there is no necessary difficulty in supposing how man, with his superior mental organization, (a brain five times heavier,) was able, in his primitive state, without instruction, to turn many things in nature to his use, and commence, in short, the circle of the domestic arts. He appears, in the most unfavourable circumstances, to be able to provide himself with some sort of dwelling, to make weapons, and to practise some simple kind of cookery. But, granting, it will be said, that he can go thus far, how does he ever proceed farther unprompted, seeing that many nations remain fixed for ever at this point, and seem unable to take one step in advance? It is perfectly true that there is such a fixation in many nations; but, on the other hand, all nations are not alike in mental organization, and another point has been established, that only when some favourable circumstances have settled a people in one place, do arts and social arrangements get leave to flourish. If we were to limit our view to humbly endowed nations, or the common class of minds in those called civilized, we should see absolutely no conceivable power for the origination of new ideas and devices. But let us look at the inventive class of minds which stand out amongst their fellows—the men who, with little prompting or none, conceive new ideas in science, arts, morals—and we can be at no loss to understand how and whence have arisen the elements of that civilization which history traces from country to country throughout the course of centuries. See a Pascal, reproducing the Alexandrian's problems at fifteen; a Ferguson, making clocks from the suggestions of his own brain, while tending cattle on a Morayshire heath; a boy Lawrence, in an inn on the Bath road, producing, without a master, drawings which the educated could not but admire; or look at Solon and Confucius, devising sage laws, and breathing the accents of all but divine wisdom, for their barbarous fellow-countrymen, three thousand years ago—and the whole mystery is solved at once. Amongst the arrangements of Providence is one for the production of original, inventive, and aspiring minds, which, when circumstances are not decidedly unfavourable, strike out new ideas for the benefit of their fellow-creatures, or put upon them a lasting impress of their own superior sentiments. Nations, improved by these means, become in turn foci for the diffusion of light over the adjacent regions of barbarism—their very passions helping to this end, for nothing can be more clear than that ambitious aggression has led to the civilization of many countries. Such is the process which seems to form the destined means for bringing mankind from the darkness of barbarism to the day of knowledge and mechanical and social improvement. Even the noble art of letters is but, as Dr. Adam Fergusson has remarked, "a natural produce of the human mind, which will rise spontaneously, wherever men are happily placed;" original alike amongst the ancient Egyptians and the dimly monumented Toltecans of Yucatan. "Banish," says Dr. Gall, "music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, all the arts and sciences, and let your Homers, Raphaels, Michael Angelos, Glucks, and Canovas, be forgotten, yet let men of genius of every description spring up, and poetry, music, painting, architecture, sculpture, and all the arts and sciences will again shine out in all their glory. Twice within the records of history has the human race traversed the great circle of its entire destiny, and twice has the rudeness of barbarism been followed by a higher degree of refinement. It is a great mistake to suppose one people to have proceeded from another on account of their conformity of manners, customs, and arts. The swallow of Paris builds its nest like the swallow of Vienna, but does it thence follow that the former sprung from the latter? With the same causes we have the same effects; with the same organization we have the manifestation of the same powers."



MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS.



It has been one of the most agreeable tasks of modern science to trace the wonderfully exact adaptations of the organization of animals to the physical circumstances amidst which they are destined to live. From the mandibles of insects to the hand of man, all is seen to be in the most harmonious relation to the things of the outward world, thus clearly proving that DESIGN presided in the creation of the whole—design again implying a designer, another word for a CREATOR.

It would be tiresome to present in this place even a selection of the proofs which have been adduced on this point. The Natural Theology of Paley, and the Bridgewater Treatises, place the subject in so clear a light, that the general postulate may be taken for granted. The physical constitution of animals is, then, to be regarded as in the nicest congruity and adaptation to the external world.

Less clear ideas have hitherto been entertained on the mental constitution of animals. The very nature of this constitution is not as yet generally known or held as ascertained. There is, indeed, a notion of old standing, that the mind is in some way connected with the brain; but the metaphysicians insist that it is, in reality, known only by its acts or effects, and they accordingly present the subject in a form which is unlike any other kind of science, for it does not so much as pretend to have nature for its basis. There is a general disinclination to regard mind in connexion with organization, from a fear that this must needs interfere with the cherished religious doctrine of the spirit of man, and lower him to the level of the brutes. A distinction is therefore drawn between our mental manifestations and those of the lower animals, the latter being comprehended under the term instinct, while ours are collectively described as mind, mind being again a received synonyme with soul, the immortal part of man. There is here a strange system of confusion and error, which it is most imprudent to regard as essential to religion, since candid investigations of nature tend to shew its untenableness. There is, in reality, nothing to prevent our regarding man as specially endowed with an immortal spirit, at the same time that his ordinary mental manifestations are looked upon as simple phenomena resulting from organization, those of the lower animals being phenomena absolutely the same in character, though developed within much narrower limits. {326}

What has chiefly tended to take mind, in the eyes of learned and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its apparently irregular and wayward character. How different the manifestations in different beings! how unstable in all!—at one time so calm, at another so wild and impulsive! It seemed impossible that anything so subtle and aberrant could be part of a system, the main features of which are regularity and precision. But the irregularity of mental phenomena is only in appearance. When we give up the individual, and take the mass, we find as much uniformity of result as in any other class of natural phenomena. The irregularity is exactly of the same kind as that of the weather. No man can say what may be the weather of to- morrow; but the quantity of rain which falls in any particular place in any five years, is precisely the same as the quantity which falls in any other five years at the same place. Thus, while it is absolutely impossible to predict of any one Frenchman that during next year he will commit a crime, it is quite certain that about one in every six hundred and fifty of the French people will do so, because in past years the proportion has generally been about that amount, the tendencies to crime in relation to the temptations being everywhere invariable over a sufficiently wide range of time. So also, the number of persons taken in charge by the police in London for being drunk and disorderly on the streets, is, week by week, a nearly uniform quantity, shewing that the inclination to drink to excess is always in the mass about the same, regard being had to the existing temptations or stimulations to this vice. Even mistakes and oversights are of regular recurrence, for it is found in the post- offices of large cities, that the number of letters put in without addresses is year by year the same. Statistics has made out an equally distinct regularity in a wide range, with regard to many other things concerning the mind, and the doctrine founded upon it has lately produced a scheme which may well strike the ignorant with surprise. It was proposed to establish in London a society for ensuring the integrity of clerks, secretaries, collectors, and all such functionaries as are usually obliged to find security for money passing through their hands in the course of business. A gentleman of the highest character as an actuary spoke of the plan in the following terms:- "If a thousand bankers' clerks were to club together to indemnify their securities, by the payment of one pound a year each, and if each had given security for 500l., it is obvious that two in each year might become defaulters to that amount, four to half the amount, and so on, without rendering the guarantee fund insolvent. If it be tolerably well ascertained that the instances of dishonesty (yearly) among such persons amount to one in five hundred, this club would continue to exist, subject to being in debt in a bad year, to an amount which it would be able to discharge in good ones. The only question necessary to be asked previous to the formation of such a club would be,—may it not be feared that the motive to resist dishonesty would be lessened by the existence of the club, or that ready-made rogues, by belonging to it, might find the means of obtaining situations which they would otherwise have been kept out of by the impossibility of obtaining security among those who know them? Suppose this be sufficiently answered by saying, that none but those who could bring satisfactory testimony to their previous good character should be allowed to join the club; that persons who may now hope that a deficiency on their parts will be made up and hushed up by the relative or friend who is security, will know very well that the club will have no motive to decline a prosecution, or to keep the secret, and so on. It then only remains to ask, whether the sum demanded for the guarantee is sufficient?" {331} The philosophical principle on which the scheme proceeds, seems to be simply this, that, amongst a given (large) number of persons of good character, there will be, within a year or other considerable space of time, a determinate number of instances in which moral principle and the terror of the consequences of guilt will be overcome by temptations of a determinate kind and amount, and thus occasion a certain periodical amount of loss which the association must make up.

This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem. It is hardly necessary to say, much less to argue, that mental action, being proved to be under law, passes at once into the category of natural things. Its old metaphysical character vanishes in a moment, and the distinction usually taken between physical and moral is annulled, as only an error in terms. This view agrees with what all observation teaches, that mental phenomena flow directly from the brain. They are seen to be dependent on naturally constituted and naturally conditioned organs, and thus obedient, like all other organic phenomena, to law. And how wondrous must the constitution of this apparatus be, which gives us consciousness of thought and of affection, which makes us familiar with the numberless things of earth, and enables us to rise in conception and communion to the councils of God himself! It is matter which forms the medium or instrument—a little mass which, decomposed, is but so much common dust; yet in its living constitution, designed, formed, and sustained by Almighty Wisdom, how admirable its character! how reflective of the unutterable depths of that Power by which it was so formed, and is so sustained!

In the mundane economy, mental action takes its place as a means of providing for the independent existence and the various relations of animals, each species being furnished according to its special necessities and the demands of its various relations. The nervous system—the more comprehensive term for its organic apparatus—is variously developed in different classes and species, and also in different individuals, the volume or mass bearing a general relation to the amount of power. In the mollusca and crustacea we see simply a ganglionic cord pervading the extent of the body, and sending out lateral filaments. In the vertebrata, we find a brain with a spinal cord, and branching lines of nervous tissue. {333} But here, as in the general structure of animals, the great principle of unity is observed. The brain of the vertebrata is merely an expansion of one of the ganglions of the nervous cord of the mollusca and crustacea. Or the corresponding ganglion of the mollusca and crustacea may be regarded as the rudiment of a brain; the superior organ thus appearing as only a farther development of the inferior. There are many facts which tend to prove that the action of this apparatus is of an electric nature, a modification of that surprising agent, which takes magnetism, heat, and light, as other subordinate forms, and of whose general scope in this great system of things we are only beginning to have a right conception. It has been found that simple electricity, artificially produced, and sent along the nerves of a dead body, excites muscular action. The brain of a newly-killed animal being taken out, and replaced by a substance which produces electric action, the operation of digestion, which had been interrupted by the death of the animal, was resumed, shewing the absolute identity of the brain with a galvanic battery. Nor is this a very startling idea, when we reflect that electricity is almost as metaphysical as ever mind was supposed to be. It is a thing perfectly intangible, weightless. Metal may be magnetized, or heated to seven hundred of Fahrenheit, without becoming the hundredth part of a grain heavier. And yet electricity is a real thing, an actual existence in nature, as witness the effects of heat and light in vegetation—the power of the galvanic current to re-assemble the particles of copper from a solution, and make them again into a solid plate—the rending force of the thunderbolt as it strikes the oak; see also how both heat and light observe the angle of incidence in reflection, as exactly as does the grossest stone thrown obliquely against a wall. So mental action may be imponderable, intangible, and yet a real existence, and ruled by the Eternal through his laws. {335}

Common observation shews a great general superiority of the human mind over that of the inferior animals. Man's mind is almost infinite in device; it ranges over all the world; it forms the most wonderful combinations; it seeks back into the past, and stretches forward into the future; while the animals generally appear to have a narrow range of thought and action. But so also has an infant but a limited range, and yet it is mind which works there, as well as in the most accomplished adults. The difference between mind in the lower animals and in man is a difference in degree only; it is not a specific difference. All who have studied animals by actual observation, and even those who have given a candid attention to the subject in books, must attain more or less clear convictions of this truth, notwithstanding all the obscurity which prejudice may have engendered. We see animals capable of affection, jealousy, envy; we see them quarrel, and conduct quarrels, in the very manner pursued by the more impulsive of our own race. We see them liable to flattery, inflated with pride, and dejected by shame. We see them as tender to their young as human parents are, and as faithful to a trust as the most conscientious of human servants. The horse is startled by marvellous objects, as a man is. The dog and many others shew tenacious memory. The dog also proves himself possessed of imagination, by the act of dreaming. Horses, finding themselves in want of a shoe, have of their own accord gone to a farrier's shop where they were shod before. Cats, closed up in rooms, will endeavour to obtain their liberation by pulling a latch or ringing a bell. It has several times been observed that in a field of cattle, when one or two were mischievous, and persisted long in annoying or tyrannizing over the rest, the herd, to all appearance, consulted, and then, making a united effort, drove the troublers off the ground. The members of a rookery have also been observed to take turns in supplying the needs of a family reduced to orphanhood. All of these are acts of reason, in no respect different from similar acts of men. Moreover, although there is no heritage of accumulated knowledge amongst the lower animals, as there is amongst us, they are in some degree susceptible of those modifications of natural character, and capable of those accomplishments, which we call education. The taming and domestication of animals, and the changes thus produced upon their nature in the course of generations, are results identical with civilization amongst ourselves; and the quiet, servile steer is probably as unlike the original wild cattle of this country, as the English gentleman of the present day is unlike the rude baron of the age of King John. Between a young, unbroken horse, and a trained one, there is, again, all the difference which exists between a wild youth reared at his own discretion in the country, and the same person when he has been toned down by long exposure to the influences of refined society. On the accomplishments acquired by animals it were superfluous to enter at any length; but I may advert to the dogs of M. Leonard, as remarkable examples of what the animal intellect may be trained to. When four pieces of card are laid down before them, each having a number pronounced ONCE in connexion with it, they will, after a re-arrangement of the pieces, select any one named by its number. They also play at dominoes, and with so much skill as to triumph over biped opponents, whining if the adversary place a wrong piece, or if they themselves be deficient in a right one. Of extensive combinations of thought we have no reason to believe that any animal is capable—and yet most of us must feel the force of Walter Scott's remark, that there was scarcely anything which he would not believe of a dog. There is a curious result of education in certain animals, namely, that habits to which they have been trained in some instances become hereditary. For example, the accomplishment of pointing at game, although a pure result of education, appears in the young pups brought up apart from their parents and kind. The peculiar leap of the Irish horse, acquired in the course of traversing a boggy country, is continued in the progeny brought up in England. This hereditariness of specific habits suggests a relation to that form of psychological demonstration usually called instinct; but instinct is only another term for mind, or is mind in a peculiar stage of development; and though the fact were otherwise, it could not affect the postulate, that demonstrations such as have been enumerated are mainly intellectual demonstrations, not to be distinguished as such from those of human beings.

More than this, the lower animals manifested mental phenomena long before man existed. While as yet there was no brain capable of working out a mathematical problem, the economy of the six-sided figure was exemplified by the instinct of the bee. Ere human musician had whistled or piped, the owl hooted in B flat, the cuckoo had her song of a falling third, and the chirp of the cricket was in B. The dog and the elephant prefigured the sagacity of the human mind. The love of a human mother for her babe was anticipated by nearly every humbler mammal, the carnaria not excepted. The peacock strutted, the turkey blustered, and the cock fought for victory, just as human beings afterwards did, and still do. Our faculty of imitation, on which so much of our amusement depends, was exercised by the mocking-bird; and the whole tribe of monkeys must have walked about the pre-human world, playing off those tricks in which we see the comicality and mischief-making of our character so curiously exaggerated.

The unity and simplicity which characterize nature give great antecedent probability to what observation seems about to establish, that, as the brain of the vertebrata generally is just an advanced condition of a particular ganglion in the mollusca and crustacea, so are the brains of the higher and more intelligent mammalia only farther developments of the brains of the inferior orders of the same class. Or, to the same purpose, it may be said, that each species has certain superior developments, according to its needs, while others are in a rudimental or repressed state. This will more clearly appear after some inquiry has been made into the various powers comprehended under the term mind.

One of the first and simplest functions of mind is to give consciousness—consciousness of our identity and of our existence. This, apparently, is independent of the SENSES, which are simply media, and, as Locke has shewn, the only media, through which ideas respecting the external world reach the brain. The access of such ideas to the brain is the act to which the metaphysicians have given the name of perception. Gall, however, has shewn, by induction from a vast number of actual cases, that there is a part of the brain devoted to perception, and that even this is subdivided into portions which are respectively dedicated to the reception of different sets of ideas, as those of form, size, colour, weight, objects in their totality, events in their progress or occurrence, time, musical sounds, &c. The system of mind invented by this philosopher—the only one founded upon nature, or which even pretends to or admits of that necessary basis—shews a portion of the brain acting as a faculty of comic ideas, another of imitation, another of wonder, one for discriminating or observing differences, and another in which resides the power of tracing effects to causes. There are also parts of the brain for the sentimental part of our nature, or the affections, at the head of which stand the moral feelings of benevolence, conscientiousness, and veneration. Through these, man stands in relation to himself, his fellow-men, the external world, and his God; and through these comes most of the happiness of man's life, as well as that which he derives from the contemplation of the world to come, and the cultivation of his relation to it, (pure religion.) The other sentiments may be briefly enumerated, their names being sufficient in general to denote their functions— firmness, hope, cautiousness, self-esteem, love of approbation, secretiveness, marvellousness, constructiveness, imitation, combativeness, destructiveness, concentrativeness, adhesiveness, love of the opposite sex, love of offspring, alimentiveness, and love of life. Through these faculties, man is connected with the external world, and supplied with active impulses to maintain his place in it as an individual and as a species. There is also a faculty, (language) for expressing, by whatever means, (signs, gestures, looks, conventional terms in speech,) the ideas which arise in the mind. There is a particular state of each of these faculties, when the ideas of objects once formed by it are revived or reproduced, a process which seems to be intimately allied with some of the phenomena of the new science of photography, when images impressed by reflection of the sun's rays upon sensitive paper are, after a temporary obliteration, resuscitated on the sheet being exposed to the fumes of mercury. Such are the phenomena of memory, that handmaid of intellect, without which there could be no accumulation of mental capital, but an universal and continual infancy. Conception and imagination appear to be only intensities, so to speak, of the state of brain in which memory is produced. On their promptness and power depend most of the exertions which distinguish the man of arts and letters, and even in no small measure the cultivator of science.

The faculties above described—the actual elements of the mental constitution—are seen in mature man in an indefinite potentiality and range of action. It is different with the lower animals. They are there comparatively definite in their power and restricted in their application. The reader is familiar with what are called instincts in some of the humbler species, that is, an uniform and unprompted tendency towards certain particular acts, as the building of cells by the bee, the storing of provisions by that insect and several others, and the construction of nests for a coming progeny by birds. This quality is nothing more than a mode of operation peculiar to the faculties in a humble state of endowment, or early stage of development. The cell formation of the bee, the house- building of ants and beavers, the web-spinning of spiders, are but primitive exercises of constructiveness, the faculty which, indefinite with us, leads to the arts of the weaver, upholsterer, architect, and mechanist, and makes us often work delightedly where our labours are in vain, or nearly so. The storing of provisions by the ants is an exercise of acquisitiveness,—the faculty which with us makes rich men and misers. A vast number of curious devices, by which insects provide for the protection and subsistence of their young, whom they are perhaps never to see, are most probably a peculiar restricted effort of philoprogenitiveness. The common source of this class of acts, and of common mental operations, is shewn very convincingly by the melting of the one set into the other. Thus, for example, the bee and bird will make modifications in the ordinary form of their cells and nests when necessity compels them. Thus, the alimentiveness of such animals as the dog, usually definite with regard to quantity and quality, can be pampered or educated up to a kind of epicurism, that is, an indefiniteness of object and action. The same faculty acts limitedly in ourselves at first, dictating the special act of sucking; afterwards it acquires indefiniteness. Such is the real nature of the distinction between what are called instincts and reason, upon which so many volumes have been written without profit to the world. All faculties are instinctive, that is, dependent on internal and inherent impulses. This term is therefore not specially applicable to either of the recognised modes of the operation of the faculties. We only, in the one case, see the faculty in an immature and slightly developed state; in the other, in its most advanced condition. In the one case it is DEFINITE, in the other INDEFINITE, in its range of action. These terms would perhaps be the most suitable for expressing the distinction.

In the humblest forms of being we can trace scarcely anything besides a definite action in a few of the faculties. Generally speaking, as we ascend in the scale, we see more and more of the faculties in exercise, and these tending more to the indefinite mode of manifestation. And for this there is the obvious reason in providence, that the lowest animals have all of them a very limited sphere of existence, born only to perform a few functions, and enjoy a brief term of life, and then give way to another generation, so that they do not need much mental guidance. At higher points in the scale, the sphere of existence is considerably extended, and the mental operations are less definite accordingly. The horse, dog, and a few other rasorial types, noted for their serviceableness to our race, have the indefinite powers in no small endowment. Man, again, shews very little of the definite mode of operation, and that little chiefly in childhood, or in barbarism or idiocy. Destined for a wide field of action, and to be applicable to infinitely varied contingencies, he has all the faculties developed to a high pitch of indefiniteness, that he may be ready to act well in all imaginable cases. His commission, it may be said, gives large discretionary powers, while that of the inferior animals is limited to a few precise directions. But when the human brain is congenitally imperfect or diseased, or when it is in the state of infancy, we see in it an approach towards the character of the brains of some of the inferior animals. Dr. G. J. Davey states that he has frequently witnessed, among his patients at the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, indications of a particular abnormal cerebration which forcibly reminded him of the specific healthy characteristics of animals lower in the scale of organization; {346} and every one must have observed how often the actions of children, especially in their moments of play, and where their selfish feelings are concerned, bear a resemblance to those of certain familiar animals. {347} Behold, then, the wonderful unity of the whole system. The grades of mind, like the forms of being, are mere stages of development. In the humbler forms, but a few of the mental faculties are traceable, just as we see in them but a few of the lineaments of universal structure. In man the system has arrived at its highest condition. The few gleams of reason, then, which we see in the lower animals, are precisely analogous to such a development of the fore-arm as we find in the paddle of the whale. Causality, comparison, and other of the nobler faculties, are in them RUDIMENTAL.

Bound up as we thus are by an identity in the character of our mental organization with the lower animals, we are yet, it will be observed, strikingly distinguished from them by this great advance in development. We have faculties in full force and activity which the animals either possess not at all, or in so low and obscure a form as to be equivalent to non-existence. Now these parts of mind are those which connect us with the things that are not of this world. We have veneration, prompting us to the worship of the Deity, which the animals lack. We have hope, to carry us on in thought beyond the bounds of time. We have reason, to enable us to inquire into the character of the Great Father, and the relation of us, his humble creatures, towards him. We have conscientiousness and benevolence, by which we can in a faint and humble measure imitate, in our conduct, that which he exemplifies in the whole of his wondrous doings. Beyond this, mental science does not carry us in support of religion: the rest depends on evidence of a different kind. But it is surely much that we thus discover in nature a provision for things so important. The existence of faculties having a regard to such things is a good evidence that such things exist. The face of God is reflected in the organization of man, as a little pool reflects the glorious sun.

The affective or sentimental faculties are all of them liable to operate whenever appropriate objects or stimuli are presented, and this they do as irresistibly and unerringly as the tree sucks up moisture which it requires, with only this exception, that one faculty often interferes with the action of another, and operates instead by force of superior inherent strength or temporary activity. For example, alimentiveness may be in powerful operation with regard to its appropriate object, producing a keen appetite, and yet it may not act, in consequence of the more powerful operation of cautiousness, warning against evil consequences likely to ensue from the desired indulgence. This liability to flit from under the control of one feeling to the control of another, constitutes what is recognised as free will in man, being nothing more than a vicissitude in the supremacy of the faculties over each other.

It is a common mistake to suppose that the individuals of our own species are all of them formed with similar faculties—similar in power and tendency—and that education and the influence of circumstances produce all the differences which we observe. There is not, in the old systems of mental philosophy, any doctrine more opposite to the truth than this. It is refuted at once by the great differences of intellectual tendency and moral disposition to be observed amongst a group of young children who have been all brought up in circumstances perfectly identical—even in twins, who have never been but in one place, under the charge of one nurse, attended to alike in all respects. The mental characters of individuals are inherently various, as the forms of their persons and the features of their faces are; and education and circumstances, though their influence is not to be despised, are incapable of entirely altering these characters, where they are strongly developed. That the original characters of mind are dependent on the volume of particular parts of the brain and the general quality of that viscus, is proved by induction from an extensive range of observations, the force of which must have been long since universally acknowledged but for the unpreparedness of mankind to admit a functional connexion between mind and body. The different mental characters of individuals may be presumed from analogy to depend on the same law of development which we have seen determining forms of being and the mental characters of particular species. This we may conceive as carrying forward the intellectual powers and moral dispositions of some to a high pitch, repressing those of others at a moderate amount, and thus producing all the varieties which we see in our fellow-creatures. Thus a Cuvier and a Newton are but expansions of a clown, and the person emphatically called the wicked man, is one whose highest moral feelings are rudimental. Such differences are not confined to our species; they are only less strongly marked in many of the inferior animals. There are clever dogs and wicked horses, as well as clever men and wicked men, and education sharpens the talents, and in some degree regulates the dispositions of animals, as it does our own. Here I may advert to a very interesting analogy between the mental characters of the types in the quinary system of zoology and the characters of individual men. We have seen that the pre-eminent type is usually endowed with an harmonious assemblage of the mental qualities belonging to the whole group, while the sub-typical inclines to ferocity, the rasorial to gentleness, and so on. Now, amongst individuals, some appear to be almost exclusively of the sub- typical, and others of the rasorial characters, while to a limited number is given the finely assorted assemblage of qualities which places them on a parallel with the typical. To this may be attributed the universality which marks all the very highest brains, such as those of Shakespeare and Scott, men of whom it has been remarked that they must have possessed within themselves not only the poet, but the warrior, the statesman, and the philosopher; and who, moreover, appear to have had the mild and manly, the moral and the forcible parts of our nature, in the most perfect balance.

There is, nevertheless, a general adaptation of the mental constitution of man to the circumstances in which he lives, as there is between all the parts of nature to each other. The goods of the physical world are only to be realized by ingenuity and industrious exertion; behold, accordingly, an intellect full of device, and a fabric of the faculties which would go to pieces or destroy itself if it were not kept in constant occupation. Nature presents to us much that is sublime and beautiful: behold faculties which delight in contemplating these properties of hers, and in rising upon them, as upon wings, to the presence of the Eternal. It is also a world of difficulties and perils, and see how a large portion of our species are endowed with vigorous powers which take a pleasure in meeting and overcoming difficulty and danger. Even that principle on which our faculties are constituted—a wide range of freedom in which to act for all various occasions—necessitates a resentful faculty, by which individuals may protect themselves from the undue and capricious exercise of each other's faculties, and thus preserve their individual rights. So also there is cautiousness, to give us a tendency to provide against the evils by which we may be assailed; and secretiveness, to enable us to conceal whatever, being divulged, would be offensive to others or injurious to ourselves,—a function which obviously has a certain legitimate range of action, however liable to be abused. The constitution of the mind generally points to a state of intimate relation of individuals towards society, towards the external world, and towards things above this world. No individual being is integral or independent; he is only part of an extensive piece of social mechanism. The inferior mind, full of rude energy and unregulated impulse, does not more require a superior nature to act as its master and its mentor, than does the superior nature require to be surrounded by such rough elements on which to exercise its high endowments as a ruling and tutelary power. This relation of each to each produces a vast portion of the active business of life. It is easy to see that, if we were all alike in our moral tendencies, and all placed on a medium of perfect moderation in this respect, the world would be a scene of everlasting dulness and apathy. It requires the variety of individual constitution to give moral life to the scene.

The indefiniteness of the potentiality of the human faculties, and the complexity which thus attends their relations, lead unavoidably to occasional error. If we consider for a moment that there are not less than thirty such faculties, that they are each given in different proportions to different persons, that each is at the same time endowed with a wide discretion as to the force and frequency of its action, and that our neighbours, the world, and our connexions with something beyond it, are all exercising an ever-varying influence over us, we cannot be surprised at the irregularities attending human conduct. It is simply the penalty paid for the superior endowment. It is here that the imperfection of our nature resides. Causality and conscientiousness are, it is true, guides over all; but even these are only faculties of the same indeterminate constitution as the rest, and partake accordingly of the same inequality of action. Man is therefore a piece of mechanism, which never can act so as to satisfy his own ideas of what he might be—for he can imagine a state of moral perfection, (as he can imagine a globe formed of diamonds, pearls, and rubies,) though his constitution forbids him to realize it. There ever will, in the best disposed and most disciplined minds, be occasional discrepancies between the amount of temptation and the power summoned for regulation or resistance, or between the stimulus and the mobility of the faculty; and hence those errors, and shortcomings, and excesses, without end, with which the good are constantly finding cause to charge themselves. There is at the same time even here a possibility of improvement. In infancy, the impulses are all of them irregular; a child is cruel, cunning, and false, under the slightest temptation, but in time learns to control these inclinations, and to be habitually humane, frank, and truthful. So is human society, in its earliest stages, sanguinary, aggressive, and deceitful, but in time becomes just, faithful, and benevolent. To such improvements there is a natural tendency which will operate in all fair circumstances, though it is not to be expected that irregular and undue impulses will ever be altogether banished from the system.

It may still be a puzzle to many, how beings should be born into the world whose organization is such that they unavoidably, even in a civilized country, become malefactors. Does God, it may be asked, make criminals? Does he fashion certain beings with a predestination to evil? He does not do so; and yet the criminal type of brain, as it is called, comes into existence in accordance with laws which the Deity has established. It is not, however, as the result of the first or general intention of those laws, but as an exception from their ordinary and proper action. The production of those evilly disposed beings is in this manner. The moral character of the progeny depends in a general way, (as does the physical character also,) upon conditions of the parents,—both general conditions, and conditions at the particular time of the commencement of the existence of the new being, and likewise external conditions affecting the foetus through the mother. Now the amount of these conditions is indefinite. The faculties of the parents, as far as these are concerned, may have oscillated for the time towards the extreme of tensibility in one direction. The influences upon the foetus may have also been of an extreme and unusual kind. Let us suppose that the conditions upon the whole have been favourable for the development, not of the higher, but of the lower sentiments, and of the propensities of the new being, the result will necessarily be a mean type of brain. Here, it will be observed, God no more decreed an immoral being, than he decreed an immoral paroxysm of the sentiments. Our perplexity is in considering the ill-disposed being by himself. He is only a part of a series of phenomena, traceable to a principle good in the main, but which admits of evil as an exception. We have seen that it is for wise ends that God leaves our moral faculties to an indefinite range of action; the general good results of this arrangement are obvious; but exceptions of evil are inseparable from such a system, and this is one of them. To come to particular illustration—when a people are oppressed, or kept in a state of slavery, they invariably contract habits of lying, for the purpose of deceiving and outwitting their superiors, falsehood being a refuge of the weak under difficulties. What is a habit in parents becomes an inherent quality in children. We are not, therefore, to be surprised when a traveller tells us that black children in the West Indies appear to lie by instinct, and never answer a white person truly even in the simplest matter. Here we have secretiveness roused in a people to a state of constant and exalted exercise; an over tendency of the nervous energy in that direction is the consequence, and a new organic condition is established. This tells upon the progeny, which comes into the world with secretiveness excessive in volume and activity. All other evil characteristics may be readily conceived as being implanted in a new generation in the same way. And sometimes not one, but several generations, may be concerned in bringing up the result to a pitch which produces crime. It is, however, to be observed, that the general tendency of things is to a limitation, not the extension of such abnormally constituted beings. The criminal brain finds itself in a social scene where all is against it. It may struggle on for a time, but the medium and superior natures are never long at a loss in getting the better of it. The disposal of such beings will always depend much on the moral state of a community, the degree in which just views prevail with regard to human nature, and the feelings which accident may have caused to predominate at a particular time. Where the mass was little enlightened or refined, and terrors for life or property were highly excited, malefactors have ever been treated severely. But when order is generally triumphant, and reason allowed sway, men begin to see the true case of criminals—namely, that while one large department are victims of erroneous social conditions, another are brought to error by tendencies which they are only unfortunate in having inherited from nature. Criminal jurisprudence then addresses itself less to the direct punishment than to the reformation and care-taking of those liable to its attention. And such a treatment of criminals, it may be farther remarked, so that it stop short of affording any encouragement to crime, (a point which experience will determine,) is evidently no more than justice, seeing how accidentally all forms of the moral constitution are distributed, and how thoroughly mutual obligation shines throughout the whole frame of society—the strong to help the weak, the good to redeem and restrain the bad.

The sum of all we have seen of the psychical constitution of man is, that its Almighty Author has destined it, like everything else, to be developed from inherent qualities, and to have a mode of action depending solely on its own organization. Thus the whole is complete on one principle. The masses of space are formed by law; law makes them in due time theatres of existence for plants and animals; sensation, disposition, intellect, are all in like manner developed and sustained in action by law. It is most interesting to observe into how small a field the whole of the mysteries of nature thus ultimately resolve themselves. The inorganic has one final comprehensive law, GRAVITATION. The organic, the other great department of mundane things, rests in like manner on one law, and that is,—DEVELOPMENT. Nor may even these be after all twain, but only branches of one still more comprehensive law, the expression of that unity which man's wit can scarcely separate from Deity itself.



PURPOSE AND GENERAL CONDITION OF THE ANIMATED CREATION.



We have now to inquire how this view of the constitution and origin of nature bears upon the condition of man upon the earth, and his relation to supra-mundane things.

That enjoyment is the proper attendant of animal existence is pressed upon us by all that we see and all we experience. Everywhere we perceive in the lower creatures, in their ordinary condition, symptoms of enjoyment. Their whole being is a system of needs, the supplying of which is gratification, and of faculties, the exercise of which is pleasurable. When we consult our own sensations, we find that, even in a sense of a healthy performance of all the functions of the animal economy, God has furnished us with an innocent and very high enjoyment. The mere quiet consciousness of a healthy play of the mental functions—a mind at ease with itself and all around it— is in like manner extremely agreeable. This negative class of enjoyments, it may be remarked, is likely to be even more extensively experienced by the lower animals than by man, at least in the proportion of their absolute endowments, as their mental and bodily functions are much less liable to derangement than ours. To find the world constituted on this principle is only what in reason we would expect. We cannot conceive that so vast a system could have been created for a contrary purpose. No averagely constituted human being would, in his own limited sphere of action, think of producing a similar system upon an opposite principle. But to form so vast a range of being, and to make being everywhere a source of gratification, is conformable to our ideas of a Creator in whom we are constantly discovering traits of a nature, of which our own is but a faint and far-cast shadow at the best.

It appears at first difficult to reconcile with this idea the many miseries which we see all sentient beings, ourselves included, occasionally enduring. How, the sage has asked in every age, should a Being so transcendently kind, have allowed of so large an admixture of evil in the condition of his creatures? Do we not at length find an answer to a certain extent satisfactory, in the view which has now been given of the constitution of nature? We there see the Deity operating in the most august of his works by fixed laws, an arrangement which, it is clear, only admits of the main and primary results being good, but disregards exceptions. Now the mechanical laws are so definite in their purposes, that no exceptions ever take place in that department; if there is a certain quantity of nebulous matter to be agglomerated and divided and set in motion as a planetary system, it will be so with hair's-breadth accuracy, and cannot be otherwise. But the laws presiding over meteorology, life, and mind, are necessarily less definite, as they have to produce a great variety of mutually related results. Left to act independently of each other, each according to its separate commission, and each with a wide range of potentiality to be modified by associated conditions, they can only have effects generally beneficial: often there must be an interference of one law with another, often a law will chance to operate in excess, or upon a wrong object, and thus evil will be produced. Thus, winds are generally useful in many ways, and the sea is useful as a means of communication between one country and another; but the natural laws which produce winds are of indefinite range of action, and sometimes are unusually concentrated in space or in time, so as to produce storms and hurricanes, by which much damage is done; the sea may be by these causes violently agitated, so that many barks and many lives perish. Here, it is evident, the evil is only exceptive. Suppose, again, that a boy, in the course of the lively sports proper to his age, suffers a fall which injures his spine, and renders him a cripple for life. Two things have been concerned in the case: first, the love of violent exercise, and second, the law of gravitation. Both of these things are good in the main. In the rash enterprises and rough sports in which boys engage, they prepare their bodies and minds for the hard tasks of life. By gravitation, all moveable things, our own bodies included, are kept stable on the surface of the earth. But when it chances that the playful boy loses his hold (we shall say) of the branch of a tree, and has no solid support immediately below, the law of gravitation unrelentingly pulls him to the ground, and thus he is hurt. Now it was not a primary object of gravitation to injure boys; but gravitation could not but operate in the circumstances, its nature being to be universal and invariable. The evil is, therefore, only a casual exception from something in the main good.

The same explanation applies to even the most conspicuous of the evils which afflict society. War, it may be said, and said truly, is a tremendous example of evil, in the misery, hardship, waste of human life, and mis-spending of human energies, which it occasions. But what is it that produces war? Certain tendencies of human nature, as keen assertion of a supposed right, resentment of supposed injury, acquisitiveness, desire of admiration, combativeness, or mere love of excitement. All of these are tendencies which are every day, in a legitimate extent of action, producing great and indispensable benefits to us. Man would be a tame, indolent, unserviceable being without them, and his fate would be starvation. War, then, huge evil though it be, is, after all, but the exceptive case, a casual misdirection of properties and powers essentially good. God has given us the tendencies for a benevolent purpose. He has only not laid down any absolute obstruction to our misuse of them. That were an arrangement of a kind which he has nowhere made. But he has established many laws in our nature which tend to lessen the frequency and destructiveness of these abuses. Our reason comes to see that war is purely an evil, even to the conqueror. Benevolence interposes to make its ravages less mischievous to human comfort, and less destructive to human life. Men begin to find that their more active powers can be exercised with equal gratification on legitimate objects; for example, in overcoming the natural difficulties of their path through life, or in a generous spirit of emulation in a line of duty beneficial to themselves and their fellow-creatures. Thus, war at length shrinks into a comparatively narrow compass, though there certainly is no reason to suppose that it will be at any early period, if ever, altogether dispensed with, while man's constitution remains as it is. In considering an evil of this kind, we must not limit our view to our own or any past time. Placed upon the earth with faculties prepared to act, but inexperienced, and with the more active propensities necessarily in great force to suit the condition of the globe, man was apt to misuse his powers much in this way at first, compared with what he is likely to do when he advances into a condition of civilization. In the scheme of providence, thousands of years of frequent warfare, all the so-called glories which fill history, may be only an exception to the general rule.

The sex passion in like manner leads to great evils; but the evils are only an exception from the vast mass of good connected with this affection. Providence has seen it necessary to make very ample provision for the preservation and utmost possible extension of all species. The aim seems to be to diffuse existence as widely as possible, to fill up every vacant piece of space with some sentient being to be a vehicle of enjoyment. Hence this passion is conferred in great force. But the relation between the number of beings, and the means of supporting them, is only on the footing of general law. There may be occasional discrepancies between the laws operating for the multiplication of individuals, and the laws operating to supply them with the means of subsistence, and evils will be endured in consequence, even in our own highly favoured species. But against all these evils, and against those numberless vexations which have arisen in all ages from the attachment of the sexes, place the vast amount of happiness which is derived from this source—the basis of the whole circle of the domestic affections, the sweetening principle of life, the prompter of all our most generous feelings, and even of our most virtuous resolves—and every ill that can be traced to it is but as dust in the balance. And here, also, we must be on our guard against judging from what we see in the world at a particular era. As reason and the higher sentiments of man's nature increase in force, this passion is put under better regulation, so as to lessen many of the evils connected with it. The civilized man is more able to give it due control; his attachments are less the result of impulse; he studies more the weal of his partner and offspring. There are even some of the resentful feelings connected in early society with love, such as hatred of successful rivalry, and jealousy, which almost disappear in an advanced stage of civilization. The evils springing, in our own species at least, from this passion, may therefore be an exception mainly peculiar to a particular term of the world's progress, and which may be expected to decrease greatly in amount.

With respect, again, to disease, so prolific a cause of suffering to man, the human constitution is merely a complicated but regular process in electro-chemistry, which goes on well, and is a source of continual gratification, so long as nothing occurs to interfere with it injuriously, but which is liable every moment to be deranged by various external agencies, when it becomes a source of pain, and, if the injury be severe, ceases to be capable of retaining life. It may be readily admitted that the evils experienced in this way are very great; but, after all, such experiences are no more than occasional, and not necessarily frequent—exceptions from a general rule of which the direct action is to confer happiness. The human constitution might have been made of a more hardy character; but we always see hardiness and insensibility go together, and it may be of course presumed that we only could have purchased this immunity from suffering at the expense of a large portion of that delicacy in which lie some of our most agreeable sensations. Or man's faculties might have been restricted to definiteness of action, as is greatly the case with those of the lower animals, and thus we should have been equally safe from the aberrations which lead to disease; but in that event we should have been incapable of acting to so many different purposes as we are, and of the many high enjoyments which the varied action of our faculties places in our power: we should not, in short, have been human beings, but merely on a level with the inferior animals. Thus, it appears, that the very fineness of man's constitution, that which places him in such a high relation to the mundane economy, and makes him the vehicle of so many exquisitely delightful sensations—it is this which makes him liable to the sufferings of disease. It might be said, on the other hand, that the noxiousness of the agencies producing disease might have been diminished or extinguished; but the probability is, that this could not have been done without such a derangement of the whole economy of nature as would have been attended with more serious evils. For example—a large class of diseases are the result of effluvia from decaying organic matter. This kind of matter is known to be extremely useful, when mixed with earth, in favouring the process of vegetation. Supposing the noxiousness to the human constitution done away with, might we not also lose that important quality which tends so largely to increase the food raised from the ground? Perhaps (as has been suggested) the noxiousness is even a matter of special design, to induce us to put away decaying organic substances into the earth, where they are calculated to be so useful. Now man has reason to enable him to see that such substances are beneficial under one arrangement, and noxious in the other. He is, as it were, commanded to take the right method in dealing with it. In point of fact, men do not always take this method, but allow accumulations of noxious matter to gather close about their dwellings, where they generate fevers and agues. But their doing so may be regarded as only a temporary exception from the operation of mental laws, the general tendency of which is to make men adopt the proper measures. And these measures will probably be in time universally adopted, so that one extensive class of diseases will be altogether or nearly abolished.

Another large class of diseases spring from mismanagement of our personal economy. Eating to excess, eating and drinking what is noxious, disregard to that cleanliness which is necessary for the right action of the functions of the skin, want of fresh air for the supply of the lungs, undue, excessive, and irregular indulgence of the mental affections, are all of them recognised modes of creating that derangement of the system in which disease consists. Here also it may be said that a limitation of the mental faculties to definite manifestations (vulgo, instincts) might have enabled us to avoid many of these errors; but here again we are met by the consideration that, if we had been so endowed, we should have been only as the lower animals are, wanting that transcendently higher character of sensation and power, by which our enjoyments are made so much greater. In making the desire of food, for example, with us an indefinite mental manifestation, instead of the definite one, which it is amongst the lower animals, the Creator has given us a means of deriving far greater gratifications from food (consistently with health) than the lower animals appear to be capable of. He has also given us reason to act as a guiding and controlling power over this and other propensities, so that they may be prevented from becoming causes of malady. We can see that excess is injurious, and are thus prompted to moderation. We can see that all the things which we feel inclined to take are not healthful, and are thus exhorted to avoid what are pernicious. We can also see that a cleanly skin and a constant supply of pure air are necessary to the proper performance of some of the most important of the organic functions, and thus are stimulated to frequent ablution, and to a right ventilation of our parlours and sleeping apartments. And so on with the other causes of disease. Reason may not operate very powerfully to these purposes in an early state of society, and prodigious evils may therefore have been endured from disease in past ages; but these are not necessarily to be endured always. As civilization advances, reason acquires a greater ascendancy; the causes of the evils are seen and avoided; and disease shrinks into a comparatively narrow compass. The experience of our own country places this in a striking light. In the middle ages, when large towns had no police regulations, society was every now and then scourged by pestilence. The third of the people of Europe are said to have been carried off by one epidemic. Even in London the annual mortality has greatly sunk within a century. The improvement in human life, which has taken place since the construction of the Northampton tables by Dr. Price, is equally remarkable. Modern tables still shew a prodigious mortality among the young in all civilized countries—evidently a result of some prevalent error in the usual modes of rearing them. But to remedy this evil there is the sagacity of the human mind, and the sense to adopt any reformed plans which may be shewn to be necessary. By a change in the management of an orphan institution in London, during the last fifty years, an immense reduction in the mortality took place. We may of course hope to see measures devised and adopted for producing a similar improvement of infant life throughout the world at large.

In this part of our subject, the most difficult point certainly lies in those occurrences of disease where the afflicted individual has been in no degree concerned in bringing the visitation upon himself. Daily experience shews us infectious disease arising in a place where the natural laws in respect of cleanliness are neglected, and then spreading into regions where there is no blame of this kind. We then see the innocent suffering equally with those who may be called the guilty. Nay, the benevolent physician who comes to succour the miserable beings whose error may have caused the mischief, is sometimes seen to fall a victim to it, while many of his patients recover. We are also only too familiar with the transmission of diseases from erring parents to innocent children, who, accordingly suffer, and perhaps die prematurely, as it were for the sins of others. After all, however painful such cases may be in contemplation, they cannot be regarded in any other light than as exceptions from arrangements, the general working of which is beneficial.

With regard to the innocence of the suffering parties, there is one important consideration which is pressed upon us from many quarters, namely—that moral conditions have not the least concern in the working of these simply physical laws. These laws proceed with an entire independence of all such conditions, and desirably so, for otherwise there could be no certain dependence placed upon them. Thus it may happen that two persons ascending a piece of scaffolding, the one a virtuous, the other a vicious man, the former, being the less cautious of the two, ventures upon an insecure place, falls, and is killed, while the other, choosing a better footing, remains uninjured. It is not in what we can conceive of the nature of things, that there should be a special exemption from the ordinary laws of matter, to save this virtuous man. So it might be that, of two physicians, attending fever cases, in a mean part of a large city, the one, an excellent citizen, may stand in such a position with respect to the beds of the patients as to catch the infection, of which he dies in a few days, while the other, a bad husband and father, and who, unlike the other, only attends such cases with selfish ends, takes care to be as much as possible out of the stream of infection, and accordingly escapes. In both of these cases man's sense of good and evil—his faculty of conscientiousness—would incline him to destine the vicious man to destruction and save the virtuous. But the Great Ruler of Nature does not act on such principles. He has established laws for the operation of inanimate matter, which are quite unswerving, so that when we know them, we have only to act in a certain way with respect to them, in order to obtain all the benefits and avoid all the evils connected with them. He has likewise established moral laws in our nature, which are equally unswerving, (allowing for their wider range of action,) and from obedience to which unfailing good is to be derived. But the two sets of laws are independent of each other. Obedience to each gives only its own proper advantage, not the advantage proper to the other. Hence it is that virtue forms no protection against the evils connected with the physical laws, while, on the other hand, a man skilled in and attentive to these, but unrighteous and disregardful of his neighbour, is in like manner not protected by his attention to physical circumstances from the proper consequences of neglect or breach of the moral laws.

Thus it is that the innocence of the party suffering for the faults of a parent, or of any other person or set of persons, is evidently a consideration quite apart from that suffering.

It is clear, moreover, from the whole scope of the natural laws, that the individual, as far as the present sphere of being is concerned, is to the Author of Nature a consideration of inferior moment. Everywhere we see the arrangements for the species perfect; the individual is left, as it were, to take his chance amidst the melee of the various laws affecting him. If he be found inferiorly endowed, or ill befalls him, there was at least no partiality against him. The system has the fairness of a lottery, in which every one has the like chance of drawing the prize.

Yet it is also to be observed that few evils are altogether unmixed. God, contemplating apparently the unbending action of his great laws, has established others which appear to be designed to have a compensating, a repairing, and a consoling effect. Suppose, for instance, that, from a defect in the power of development in a mother, her offspring is ushered into the world destitute of some of the most useful members, or blind, or deaf, or of imperfect intellect, there is ever to be found in the parents and other relatives, and in the surrounding public, a sympathy with the sufferer, which tends to make up for the deficiency, so that he is in the long run not much a loser. Indeed, the benevolence implanted in our nature seems to be an arrangement having for one of its principal objects to cause us, by sympathy and active aid, to remedy the evils unavoidably suffered by our fellow-creatures in the course of the operation of the other natural laws. And even in the sufferer himself, it is often found that a defect in one point is made up for by an extra power in another. The blind come to have a sense of touch much more acute than those who see. Persons born without hands have been known to acquire a power of using their feet for a number of the principal offices usually served by that member. I need hardly say how remarkably fatuity is compensated by the more than usual regard paid to the children born with it by their parents, and the zeal which others usually feel to protect and succour such persons. In short, we never see evil of any kind take place where there is not some remedy or compensating principle ready to interfere for its alleviation. And there can be no doubt that in this manner suffering of all kinds is very much relieved.

We may, then, regard the globes of space as theatres designed for the residence of animated sentient beings, placed there with this as their first and most obvious purpose—namely, to be sensible of enjoyments from the exercise of their faculties in relation to external things. The faculties of the various species are very different, but the happiness of each depends on the harmony there may be between its particular faculties and its particular circumstances. For instance, place the small-brained sheep or ox in a good pasture, and it fully enjoys this harmony of relation; but man, having many more faculties, cannot be thus contented. Besides having a sufficiency of food and bodily comfort, he must have entertainment for his intellect, whatever be its grade, objects for the domestic and social affections, objects for the sentiments. He is also a progressive being, and what pleases him to-day may not please him to- morrow; but, in each case he demands a sphere of appropriate conditions in order to be happy. By virtue of his superior organization, his enjoyments are much higher and more varied than those of any of the lower animals; but the very complexity of circumstances affecting him renders it at the same time unavoidable, that his nature should be often inharmoniously placed and disagreeably affected, and that he should therefore be unhappy. Still unhappiness amongst mankind is the exception from the rule of their condition, and an exception which is capable of almost infinite diminution, by virtue of the improving reason of man, and the experience which he acquires in working out the problems of society.

To secure the immediate means of happiness it would seem to be necessary for men first to study with all care the constitution of nature, and, secondly, to accommodate themselves to that constitution, so as to obtain all the realizable advantages from acting conformably to it, and to avoid all likely evils from disregarding it. It will be of no use to sit down and expect that things are to operate of their own accord, or through the direction of a partial deity, for our benefit; equally so were it to expose ourselves to palpable dangers, under the notion that we shall, for some reason, have a dispensation or exemption from them: we must endeavour so to place ourselves, and so to act, that the arrangements which Providence has made impartially for all may be in our favour, and not against us; such are the only means by which we can obtain good and avoid evil here below. And, in doing this, it is especially necessary that care be taken to avoid interfering with the like efforts of other men, beyond what may have been agreed upon by the mass as necessary for the general good. Such interferences, tending in any way to injure the body, property, or peace of a neighbour, or to the injury of society in general, tend very much to reflect evil upon ourselves, through the re-action which they produce in the feelings of our neighbour and of society, and also the offence which they give to our own conscientiousness and benevolence. On the other hand, when we endeavour to promote the efforts of our fellow- creatures to attain happiness, we produce a re-action of the contrary kind, the tendency of which is towards our own benefit. The one course of action tends to the injury, the other to the benefit of ourselves and others. By the one course the general design of the Creator towards his creatures is thwarted; by the other it is favoured. And thus we can readily see the most substantial grounds for regarding all moral emotions and doings as divine in their nature, and as a means of rising to and communing with God. Obedience is not selfishness, which it would otherwise be—it is worship. The merest barbarians have a glimmering sense of this philosophy, and it continually shines out more and more clearly in the public mind, as a nation advances in intelligence. Nor are individuals alone concerned here. The same rule applies as between one great body or class of men and another, and also between nations. Thus if one set of men keep others in the condition of slaves—this being a gross injustice to the subjected party, the mental manifestations of that party to the masters will be such as to mar the comfort of their lives; the minds of the masters themselves will be degraded by the association with beings so degraded; and thus, with some immediate or apparent benefit from keeping slaves, there will be in a far greater degree an experience of evil. So also, if one portion of a nation, engaged in a particular department of industry, grasp at some advantages injurious to the other sections of the people, the first effect will be an injury to those other portions of the nation, and the second a re-active injury to the injurers, making their guilt their punishment. And so when one nation commits an aggression upon the property or rights of another, or even pursues towards it a sordid or ungracious policy, the effects are sure to be redoubled evil from the offended party. All of these things are under laws which make the effects, on a large range, absolutely certain; and an individual, a party, a people, can no more act unjustly with safety, than I could with safety place my leg in the track of a coming wain, or attempt to fast thirty days. We have been constituted on the principle of only being able to realize happiness for ourselves when our fellow-creatures are also happy; we must therefore both do to others only as we would have others to do to us, and endeavour to promote their happiness as well as our own, in order to find ourselves truly comfortable in this field of existence. These are words which God speaks to us as truly through his works, as if we heard them uttered in his own voice from heaven.

It will occur to every one, that the system here unfolded does not imply the most perfect conceivable love or regard on the part of the Deity towards his creatures. Constituted as we are, feeling how vain our efforts often are to attain happiness or avoid calamity, and knowing that much evil does unavoidably befall us from no fault of ours, we are apt to feel that this is a dreary view of the Divine economy; and before we have looked farther, we might be tempted to say, Far rather let us cling to the idea, so long received, that the Deity acts continually for special occasions, and gives such directions to the fate of each individual as he thinks meet; so that, when sorrow comes to us, we shall have at least the consolation of believing that it is imposed by a Father who loves us, and who seeks by these means to accomplish our ultimate good. Now, in the first place, if this be an untrue notion of the Deity and his ways, it can be of no real benefit to us; and, in the second, it is proper to inquire if there be necessarily in the doctrine of natural law any peculiarity calculated materially to affect our hitherto supposed relation to the Deity. It may be that while we are committed to take our chance in a natural system of undeviating operation, and are left with apparent ruthlessness to endure the consequences of every collision into which we knowingly or unknowingly come with each law of the system, there is a system of Mercy and Grace behind the screen of nature, which is to make up for all casualties endured here, and the very largeness of which is what makes these casualties a matter of indifference to God. For the existence of such a system, the actual constitution of nature is itself an argument. The reasoning may proceed thus: The system of nature assures us that benevolence is a leading principle in the divine mind. But that system is at the same time deficient in a means of making this benevolence of invariable operation. To reconcile this to the recognised character of the Deity, it is necessary to suppose that the present system is but a part of a whole, a stage in a Great Progress, and that the Redress is in reserve. Another argument here occurs—the economy of nature, beautifully arranged and vast in its extent as it is, does not satisfy even man's idea of what might be; he feels that, if this multiplicity of theatres for the exemplification of such phenomena as we see on earth were to go on for ever unchanged, it would not be worthy of the Being capable of creating it. An endless monotony of human generations, with their humble thinkings and doings, seems an object beneath that august Being. But the mundane economy might be very well as a portion of some greater phenomenon, the rest of which was yet to be evolved. It therefore appears that our system, though it may at first appear at issue with other doctrines in esteem amongst mankind, tends to come into harmony with them, and even to give them support. I would say, in conclusion, that, even where the two above arguments may fail of effect, there may yet be a faith derived from this view of nature sufficient to sustain us under all sense of the imperfect happiness, the calamities, the woes, and pains of this sphere of being. For let us but fully and truly consider what a system is here laid open to view, and we cannot well doubt that we are in the hands of One who is both able and willing to do us the most entire justice. And in this faith we may well rest at ease, even though life should have been to us but a protracted disease, or though every hope we had built on the secular materials within our reach were felt to be melting from our grasp. Thinking of all the contingencies of this world as to be in time melted into or lost in the greater system, to which the present is only subsidiary, let us wait the end with patience, and be of good cheer.



NOTE CONCLUSORY.



Thus ends a book, composed in solitude, and almost without the cognizance of a single human being, for the sole purpose (or as nearly so as may be) of improving the knowledge of mankind, and through that medium their happiness. For reasons which need not be specified, the author's name is retained in its original obscurity, and, in all probability, will never be generally known. I do not expect that any word of praise which the work may elicit shall ever be responded to by me; or that any word of censure shall ever be parried or deprecated. It goes forth to take its chance of instant oblivion, or of a long and active course of usefulness in the world. Neither contingency can be of any importance to me, beyond the regret or the satisfaction which may be imparted by my sense of a lost or a realized benefit to my fellow-creatures. The book, as far as I am aware, is the first attempt to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation. The idea is a bold one, and there are many circumstances of time and place to render its boldness more than usually conspicuous. But I believe my doctrines to be in the main true; I believe all truth to be valuable, and its dissemination a blessing. At the same time, I hold myself duly sensible of the common liability to error, but am certain that no error in this line has the least chance of being allowed to injure the public mind. Therefore I publish. My views, if correct, will most assuredly stand, and may sooner or later prove beneficial; if otherwise, they will as surely pass out of notice without doing any harm.

My sincere desire in the composition of the book was to give the true view of the history of nature, with as little disturbance as possible to existing beliefs, whether philosophical or religious. I have made little reference to any doctrines of the latter kind which may be thought inconsistent with mine, because to do so would have been to enter upon questions for the settlement of which our knowledge is not yet ripe. Let the reconciliation of whatever is true in my views with whatever is true in other systems come about in the fulness of calm and careful inquiry. I cannot but here remind the reader of what Dr. Wiseman has shewn so strikingly in his lectures, how different new philosophic doctrines are apt to appear after we have become somewhat familiar with them. Geology at first seems inconsistent with the authority of the Mosaic record. A storm of unreasoning indignation rises against its teachers. In time, its truths, being found quite irresistible, are admitted, and mankind continue to regard the Scriptures with the same respect as before. So also with several other sciences. Now the only objection that can be made on such ground to this book, is, that it brings forward some new hypotheses, at first sight, like geology, not in perfect harmony with that record, and arranges all the rest into a system which partakes of the same character. But may not the sacred text, on a liberal interpretation, or with the benefit of new light reflected from nature, or derived from learning, be shewn to be as much in harmony with the novelties of this volume as it has been with geology and natural philosophy? What is there in the laws of organic creation more startling to the candid theologian than in the Copernican system or the natural formation of strata? And if the whole series of facts is true, why should we shrink from inferences legitimately flowing from it? Is it not a wiser course, since reconciliation has come in so many instances, still to hope for it, still to go on with our new truths, trusting that they also will in time be found harmonious with all others? Thus we avoid the damage which the very appearance of an opposition to natural truth is calculated to inflict on any system presumed to require such support. Thus we give, as is meet, a respectful reception to what is revealed through the medium of nature, at the same time that we fully reserve our reverence for all we have been accustomed to hold sacred, not one tittle of which it may ultimately be found necessary to alter.



Footnotes:

{3} By Mr. Henderson, Professor of Astronomy in the Edinburgh University, and Lieutenant Meadows.

{5} Made by M. Argelander, late director of the Observatory at Abo.

{6} Professor Mossotti, on the Constitution of the Sidereal System, of which the Sun forms a part.—London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine, February, 1843.

{9} The orbitual revolutions of the satellites of Uranus have not as yet been clearly scanned. It has been thought that their path is retrograde compared with the rest. Perhaps this may be owing to a bouleversement of the primary, for the inclination of its equator to the ecliptic is admitted to be unusually high; but the subject is altogether so obscure, that nothing can be founded on it.

{12} Astronomy, Lardner's Cyclopaedia.

{17} M. Compte combined Huygens's theorems for the measure of centrifugal force with the law of gravitation, and thus formed a simple fundamental equation between the duration of the rotation of what he calls the producing star, and the distance of the star produced. The constants of this equation were the radius of the central star, and the intensity of gravity at its surface, which is a direct consequence of its mass. It leads directly to the third law of Kepler, which thus becomes susceptible of being conceived a priori in a cosmogonical point of view. M. Compte first applied it to the moon, and found, to his great delight, that the periodic time of that satellite agrees within an hour or two with the duration which the revolution of the earth ought to have had at the time when the lunar distance formed the limit of the earth's atmosphere. He found the coincidence less exact, but still very striking in every other case. In those of the planets he obtained for the duration of the corresponding solar rotations a value always a little less than their actual periodic times. "It is remarkable," says he, "that this difference, though increasing as the planet is more distant, preserves very nearly the same relation to the corresponding periodic time, of which it commonly forms the forty-fifth part,"—shewing, we may suppose, that only some small elements of the question had been overlooked by the calculator. The defect changes to an excess in the different systems of the satellites, where it is proportionally greater than in the planets, and unequal in the different systems. "From the whole of these comparisons," says he, "I deduced the following general result: —Supposing the mathematical limit of the solar atmosphere successively extended to the regions where the different planets are now found, the duration of the sun's rotation was, at each of these epochs, sensibly equal to that of the actual sidereal revolution of the corresponding planet; and the same is true for each planetary atmosphere in relation to the different satellites."—Cours de Philosophie Positif.