Literature and religion aside, the greatest intellects have promulgated a “philosophy of necessity.” Everything that exists, wrote Oersted in substance, depends upon the past, prepares the future, and is related to the whole. “Everything throughout creation is governed by law: but over most of the tracts that come within the active experience of mankind, the governing hand is so secret and remote, that until very large numerical masses are brought under the eye at once, the controlling power is not detected.” Jonathan Edwards said: “Nothing comes to pass without a cause. What is self-existent must be from eternity, and must be unchangeable; but as to all things that begin to be, they are not self-existent, and therefore must have some foundation for their existence without themselves.” Spinoza urged that “In no mind is there an absolute or free volition; but it is determined to choose this or that by a cause, which likewise has been fixed by another, and this again by a third, and so on forever.” Emanuel Kant contended that “every action or phenomenon, so far as it produces an event, is itself an event or occurrence, which pre-supposes another state wherein the cause is to be met with; and thus everything that happens is but a continuation of the series, and no beginning which occurs of itself is possible; consequently, all the actions of the natural causes, in the succession, are themselves again effects.” Our own Emerson asserted the omnipotence and omnipresence of law: “That the wilful and the fantastic, the low and the lofty, are encircled by a necessity.” Whatever limits us, we call fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.... The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top. None greater than these may be found in the noble realm of speculative thought. They are unequalled by few, if any. The whole field of modern science, also, is in accord with their deductions: Teaching that nature is an inevitable sequence, and that all phenomena, material and mental, are linked together by an inevitable connection. In the words of Herbert Spencer: “Various classes of facts unite to prove that the law of metamorphosis which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces. Those modes of the unknowable which we call motion, light, heat, chemical affinity, etc., are alike transferable into each other, and into those modes of the unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, emotion, and thought; these in their turns being directly or indirectly re-transferable into the original shapes.”