matter of fact rule the world, using its fictions and its phrases as mere transmitting-plates, strike keenly upon the heart of the youth, and the vibrations of instinctive passion that shake his frame are the response of a strong creature to the laws of its universe. This unlearned knowledge of good and evil is like the response of the eyes to light or of the tongue to the taste of a fruit. It was not indoctrinated; it is a reaction to a stimulus. So long as the world shall last, men will be writing books in order to explain and justify the instincts; inventing theologies and ethical codes, and projecting political programs to advance and confirm them. If you take up some particular matter and begin to trace out its consequences upon mankind, you find yourself forced boldly to embrace the sum of all human destiny. We cannot follow out this course in detail. We see only tendency; we see only influence. Enlarge our horizon as we will, we cannot live out the lives of all future generations, and thus furnish an answer to the first caviller who interrupts our argument with a “cui bono.” The generous impulses of youth represent a vision of consequences. They take in more of the future at one glance than a philosopher can state in a year. Certainly, so far as we can follow out the threads of influence, the lines seem to converge. They make a figure and point to a conclusion exactly upon that spot in the firmament where instinct would place it. If philosophy gives us a diagram, the rest of life fills it up, and embellishes it with infinite illustration. The proofs multiply, and are hurled in upon us from all quarters of life and all provinces of endeavor. The anecdotes and fables of the world, its drama, its poetry and fiction, its religion and piety, its domestic teaching and its monuments support this instinct, and describe the same figure. Further still, there is not a man who does not reveal it in his soul’s anatomy: so much so that upon every occasion except where his interests are touched, he is for virtue, and even where they are touched, it is only a question of a few degrees more heat to dissolve the habits and prejudices of a lifetime, and make him take off his coat and go into a war or a political campaign.