muscle, nerve, and brain would fade from his consciousness if there were no such thing as the electric telegraph. We think by means of words, and we have to use the same ones for so many different thoughts that as soon as new meanings have entered into one set, they creep into all our theories and begin to mould our whole cosmos; and from the theories they pass into more words, and so into our lives and institutions. Thus, not only were the Newtonian heavens the playground of just those forces which had been used for the working of the six “simple machines”, but Montesquieu insists that the English Whigs copied the new astronomy when they were creating the modern British Constitution. Referring to this in one of his essays, Woodrow Wilson drew attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States had been made on the same principle. “They [writers in the _Federalist_] speak of the _checks_ and _balances_ of the Constitution,” he said, “and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system....” And we notice that the late President, when he went on to speak of reconstructing the Constitution, was fain to lean on another analogy, reminding his hearers that government is “not a machine, but a living thing”; that it is “modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life”; and again that it is a body of men “with highly differentiated functions”. In fact, we are merely launched into another set of metaphors, of which, however, the speaker is in this case conscious, for he explicitly affirms that government is “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton”.