peculiar developments are merely evolved under a necessary law out of germs that were born within thee—are but the fruits of seeds thou broughtest into the world with thee already sown. But whatever she makes of thee, thou art no more thine own master, according to her report, than the woods that burst into bud beneath an influence they cannot control, or than the sea rolling in the wind.
Such is the award of physical science with respect to man; and, confined to his birth and the earliest periods of his life, her estimate of him is true. When contemplated during the first stages of his existence, Hamlet's pipe breathed upon by another's breath, and fingered by another's touch, and giving out sounds of discord or of harmony according to the will of the blower, is not merely a type, but is the actual reality of man.
But these are remote and visionary contemplations. Turning from man in his cradle, let us observe the actual condition of our living selves.
We are all born, as we have said, both in our external and our internal fittings up, within the domain and jurisdiction of nature; and nature, to our opening life, is a paradise of sweets.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy."
But the nascent fierceness which adds but new graces to the sportive beauty of the tiger-cub, condemns the monster of maturer years to the savage solitudes of his forest-lair, and the graceful passions of childhood naturally grow up in the man into demons of misery and blood. As life advances, the garden of nature becomes more and more a howling wilderness, and nature's passions and indulgences blacken her own shining skies: and before our course is run, life, under her guidance, has become a spectacle of greater ghastliness than death itself.
Nature prompts a purely epicurean creed, and the logic of physical science binds it down upon the understandings of men; for suppose that we should turn and fight against the force that drives us. But how can we, says the logic of physics? We are in everything at the mercy of a foreign causality, and how can we resist its sway? We are drifting before the breath of nature, and can the wave turn against the gale that is impelling it, and refuse to flow? Drift on, then, thou epicurean, thou child of nature, passive in thy theory and thy practice, and sheathed in what appears to be an irrefragable logic, and see where thy creed will land thee!
But perhaps man has been armed by nature with weapons wherewith to fight against the natural powers that are seeking to enslave him. As if nature would give man arms to be employed against herself—as if she would lift with her own hands the yoke of bondage from his neck. And even supposing that nature were thus to assist him, would she not be merely removing him from the conduct of one blind and faithless guide, to place him under that of another equally blind, and probably equally faithless? Having been misled in so many instances in obeying nature, we may well be suspicious of all her dictates.
We have also been prated to about a moral sense born within us, and this, too, by physical science—by the science that founds its whole procedure upon the law of causality—as if this law did not obliterate the very life of duty, and render it an unmeaning word. This moral sense, it is said, impels us to virtue, if its sanctions be listened to, or lets us run to crime if they be disregarded. But what impels us to listen to the voice of this monitor, or to turn away from it with a deaf ear? Still, according to physical science, it can be nothing but the force of a natural and foreign causality. Nowhere, O man! throughout the whole range of thy moral and intellectual being can physical science allow thee a single point whereon to rest the lever of thy own free co-operation. The moral power which she allows thee is at the same time a natural endowment; and being so, must of course, like other natural growths, wax or wane under laws immutable and independent of thy control. Thou art still then a dependent thing, entirely at the mercy of foreign causes, and having no security against any power that may make thee its instrument.
What, then, is to be done? This: Let us spurn from us the creed of nature, together with the fatalistic logic by which it is upheld. If we admit the logic we must admit the creed, and if we admit the creed we must admit the logic; but let us tear both
