Chemists tell us that the adjustment of the component elements of water is such, that although they readily admit of separation and are subservient to their most important uses in the economy of nature by this very facility of decomposition, yet that their tendency to recombination is equal, so that the quantity of water actually existing at this present moment in the globe is just the same as on the first day of the creation, neither the operations of nature, nor the purposes to which it has been applied by man, having used up, in the sense of destroying, a single particle of it. Alike indestructible are the separate truths that make up the great mass of human knowledge. In their ready divisibility and their manifold applications, some of them may sometimes seem to be lost; but if they disappear, it is only to enter into new combinations, many of which themselves become new truths, and so ultimately extend the boundaries of knowledge. Whatever may have been the case in time past, when the loss of an important truth, satisfactorily and practically established, may be supposed possible, such an event is inconceivable now when the art of printing at once multiplies a thousand records of it, and, with astonishing rapidity, makes it part and parcel of hundreds of thousands of minds. A thought more full of encouragement to those who labour for the improvement of their fellow beings there cannot be. No onward step is lost; no onward step is final; every such step facilitates and secures another. The savage state, that state in which gross selfishness seeks its object simply and directly by violence, is past. The semi-savage or barbarous state, in which the grossness of the selfishness is somewhat abated, and the violence by which it seeks its object in some degree mitigated, by the higher faculties and the gentler affections of our nature, but in which war still predominates, is also past. To this has succeeded the state in which we are at present, the so-called civilized state—a state in which the selfish principle still predominates, in which the justifiableness of seeking the accomplishment of selfish purposes by means of violence, that of war among the rest, is still recognized, but in which violence is not the ordinary instrument employed by selfishness, its ends being commonly accomplished by the more silent, steady, and permanent operation of institutions. This state, like the preceding, will pass away. How soon, in what precise mode, by what immediate agency, none can tell. But we are already in possession of the principle which will destroy the present and introduce a better social condition, namely, the principle at the basis of the social union, THE MAXIMUM OF THE AGGREGATE OF HAPPINESS; THE MAXIMUM OF THE AGGREGATE OF HAPPINESS SOUGHT BY THE PROMOTION OF THE MAXIMUM OF INDIVIDUAL HAPPINESS! CHAPTER IV.