and indicating that the motley polymorphous harlequinade, as it appears to us, of a polytheistic Pantheism, is at bottom reducible to a few fundamental forms; and if this be true of such a shifting kaleidoscopic exhibition as popular mythology, it holds good much more of popular morals. All moral philosophies are fundamentally the same, and cannot indeed be otherwise, being only the variously emphasized expression of the one self-existent and self-organizing Reason--the βασιλικὸς Νοῦς of Plato--which makes either a physical or a moral world possible. We shall not expect therefore to find absolutely new principles in the laws which regulate human conduct any more than in the laws of those primary vitalizing forces--Light and Heat--which {191} shape and regulate all organism, immutably and infallibly, by the inherent necessity of the great Being of sleepless underived energy of whom they are the manifestation. We shall, on the contrary, believe with an assured faith, that the principles of morals, and the primary forces of the physical universe, are as immutable and self-congruent in the essential nature of things, as the laws of measure and of magnitude traced out by the mathematician; with this advantage in favour of what has been sometimes ignorantly talked of as contingent truth, that whereas the certainty of mathematical propositions depends on the fact that they are founded on self-limiting definitions of mere thoughts, with which no disturbing condition, not even the fiat of Omnipotence, can interfere, the certainty of physical and of moral laws flows from this, that they are facts, subject to no man’s definition, and necessarily existing as normal manifestations of the great primary fact, which we call GOD. The variations therefore which undoubtedly are observed in human morals--variations peculiarly notable in the infancy and in the decline both of individuals and of races,--are not contradictions, but only partial, feeble, and inadequate expressions of immutable morality. The ebb of the tide, looked at from a local and narrow point of view, is a contradiction to the flow; but both flow and ebb are parts of the grand harmonious motion of the sleepless waters of ancient Ocean. Morals vary under varying conditions of society, as plants vary under more or less favourable conditions of growth, or landscapes under more or less happy incidences of solar light; but these variations, so far from contradicting each other, could not even exist without {192} a fundamental identity; as the element of likeness in the different members of a large family could not exist without a common parentage. And where there may not be a striking unity of expression, traceable through all the varieties of popular morality, there is always at least, as Mr. Lecky has well pointed out, a unity of tendency;[192.1] even as a plant, when it first spreads out the green lobes of its radical leaves, may present a very different