There can be no wider interval in philosophy than the separation which must exist between the laws of mechanical force and motion, and the laws of free moral action. Yet the tendency of men to assume, in the portions of human knowledge which are out of their reach, a similarity of type to those with which they are familiar, can leap over even this interval. Laplace has asserted that “an intelligence which, at a given instant, should know all the forces by which nature is urged, and the respective situation of the beings of which nature is composed, if, moreover, it were sufficiently comprehensive to subject these data to calculation, would include in the same _formula_, the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the slightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain to such an intelligence, and the future, no less than the past, would be present to its eyes.” If we speak merely of mechanical actions, this may, perhaps, be assumed to be an admissible representation of the nature of their connexion in the sight of the supreme intelligence. But to the rest of what passes in the world, such language is altogether inapplicable. A _formula_ is a brief mode of denoting a rule of calculating in which numbers are to be used: and numerical measures are applicable only to things of which the relation depend on time and space. By such elements, in such a mode, how are we to estimate happiness and virtue, thought and will? To speak of a formula with regard to such things, would be to assume that their laws must needs take the shape of those laws of the material world which our intellect most fully comprehends. A more absurd and unphilosophical assumption we can hardly imagine.