In other words, all we can say is that Nature has supplied us with certain forces or chemic tendencies and responses, and has also provided (rather roughly in certain instances) the checks and balances which govern the same. Our puny strengths will permit us to do only so much; no more. That these strengths are being enlarged from time to time is rather obvious (consider a man like John D. Rockefeller, or Napoleon, and an ape). At the same time the limitations essential to balance, reciprocity, part with part and force with force, are apparently never set aside entirely. Both Rockefeller and Napoleon find themselves decidedly limited in their powers, compelled to compromise with many things in moving to attain their dreams. And their wishes in the main have far transcended the dictates of ethics, as these have hitherto been conceived. For the most part they ignored reported or written ethics, sticking by seemingly unethical forces, subtlety, craft, the power to do all that their strength or their instincts permitted them to do. And Nature appears to have no objection to them or their results, has furthered them indeed, nor has She apparently to millions of creatures like them in spirit, or worse, as we see _worse_ here, for She permits their appearance and uses the result. Let me vary the argument slightly. The shelves of our law libraries are packed to suffocation and moldering to decay with laws ethically intended to govern things which man has never yet been able to govern entirely and probably never will be, although the instinct so to legislate probably conforms to the mechanistic instinct for balance and proportion in all things. In England they hung men for sheep-stealing a few hundred years ago, and yet sheep were and still are stolen in England. It is death to kill your neighbor, and yet when did man ever cease killing his neighbor? Is it not as often and as indifferently done to-day as ever? It means from one to twenty years in the penitentiary in America to steal, and yet men steal. It is written that one should never covet his neighbor’s wife and that adultery is a crime, yet when has the ultimate conception of these things been more than a dream? Man, or at least a part of him, a fragment of the chemical whole of which he is a part or an expression, wishes and writes laws to confirm these, but in spite of all so-called spiritual instruction, an ordered scheme of spiritual rewards and punishments, he is still not chemically able to accommodate himself to these things--not all of him, at least. Nature, his sheer, rank human nature, which sinks deep below into mechanistic, chemical and physical laws and substances, will not let him. Instead he resorts to subtlety, craft--a very unspiritual but plainly natural or chemical thing. The fact is that the power of certain individuals to do is only limited by the power of certain other individuals to resist, and their natures and tendencies are by no means the same.