121 When _Hildebrand_, for instance, objects to the application of the expression “natural law” to the economic actions of man, for the reason that it conflicts with human freedom and man’s capacity for progress (Jahrbücher der N. Œek. und Statistik., 1863, Heft., I), I cannot agree with him. I use the expression “natural law” wherever I observe uniformity, explicable in its broader connections, and not dependent on human design. That there are such uniformities there can be no question. I need only mention the philological law of the so-called “permutation of consonants,” which individuals follow when speaking—certainly not through compulsion,—and, by means of which, the progress of the speaking aggregate is made manifest. Or, I might call attention to the well known fact, that, in populous countries marriages and crimes, which are for the most part free, are divided among the different age-classes in a proportion much more uniform, from year to year, than are deaths, which are not free. I adhere all the more firmly to the expression “natural law,” because no one takes offense at or objects to the expression, “nature of the human soul.” But to this very nature of the human soul belong the freedom and responsibility of the individual, as well as the capacity of the species for progress. Compare _A. Wagner_, on Law in the Apparently capricious Actions of Man (_Die Gesetzmässigkeit in den scheinbar willkürlichen menschlichen Handlungen_, 1864, p. 63 seq.), in which, however, he only goes so far as to show that law and freedom coexist side by side as indubitable facts, while the seeming contradiction between the two remains. _Drobisch’s_ Moralische Statistik und die menschliche Willensfreiheit, 1867, is an important contribution to the literature of this question. _ 122 Whately_, in his fourth lecture (Lectures, 1831), shows in a very clear way, how London is supplied and provisioned by men with no object in view but their own personal interest, each of whom is possessed of but a very limited knowledge of the aggregate wants of its inhabitants, and yet they work into one another’s hands, in the interests of the whole, purely instinctively, and infinitely better, perhaps, than the operations of the most skillful governmental commission, organized for the same purpose. 123 Alphonsus of Castile, the king astrologer of the thirteenth century, is reported to have said, that the universe would have been much better constituted, if the Creator had asked his advice beforehand. Astronomers like Newton and Gauss have, certainly, judged otherwise.