when they are analyzed they are seen to have been wholly caused, or more or less influenced, by the genius, the thought, the discoveries, the exertions, and the acts of particular individuals who have had the force to impress themselves upon the age, and thus to make new systems, new beliefs, new products, new rules of social or political life, new tastes, and new habits of thinking and acting. Again: in some of the various orders of phenomena which are found in these different departments, there is discernible a distinct moral purpose in the shape which they have been made to assume, and in others of them there is no moral purpose discoverable, which we can say required the employment of the particular means to effect the end. Thus, astronomers can not assign a moral purpose for which the distribution of the fixed stars was made to be what it is, and which purpose could not have been answered by some other arrangement. At the same time, it is easy to see that the solar system was arranged with reference to the law of universal gravitation, which made this arrangement of the different bodies essential to the harmonious working of a great and complex piece of mechanism. The present formation of the earth may have resulted just as geologists think it has, and yet they can not say that there was no moral purpose in the division of the exterior surface of our globe into land and water, seas, continents, mountains, etc. These are departments of Nature in which man has had no influence in producing the phenomena. When we turn to those departments in which man is placed as an actor, we often find an adjustment of means to an end that is so comprehensive, as well as so plain, that we may justly conclude it to have been chosen by the creating power, with the express intent that human agency should be the means by which certain effects are to be produced. For example: man is eminently a social animal. Human society is a result of his strong social propensities. He is placed in it as an actor; and in this arrangement there is discoverable a moral purpose so plain that we may rightfully regard the social phenomena of mutual protection and improvement as proofs that society was ordained as the sphere of man's highest development on earth.