Any one who recalls to his recollection the incidents, great and small, that have filled up the days of a year past, will find it easy to divide them into two classes, of which the first, and the larger, comprises those events which common sense and experience might have enabled him to anticipate, and which, if he were wise, he did actually anticipate, so far as was necessary for the regulation of his conduct. The ground of such calculations of futurity is nothing else than the uniform course of events in the material world, and the permanent principles of human nature, and the established order of the social system: for all these, though confessedly liable to many interruptions, are yet so far constant as to afford, on the whole, a safe rule of calculation. If there were no such uniformity in the course of events, the active and reasoning faculties of man would be of no avail to him; for the exercise of them might as probably be ruinous as serviceable. In the whirl of such a supposed anarchy of nature, an intelligent agent must refrain from every movement, and resign himself to be borne along by the eddies of confusion. But this is not the character of the world we inhabit: the connection of physical causes and effects is known and calculable, so that the results of human labor are liable to only a small deduction on account of occasional irregularities. We plant and sow, and lay up stores, and build, and construct machines in tranquil hope of the expected benefit; and indeed, if the variations and irregularities of nature were much greater and more frequent than they are, or even if disappointment were as common as success, the part of wisdom would still be the same; for the laws of nature, though never so much broken in upon by incalculable accidents, would still afford _some_ ground of expectation; and an intelligent agent will always prefer to act on even the slenderest hope which reason approves, rather than to lie supine in the ruinous wheel-way of chance.