It surrounds every idea of our life, and is diffused in every branch of study. The press, the platform, the lecture-room, and the pulpit ring with it in every variety of form. Unconscious pedants are proving it. It flashes on the statistician through his registers; it guides the hand of simple philanthropy; it is obeyed by the instinct of the statesman. There is not an act of our public life which does not acknowledge it. No man denies that there are certain, and even practical laws of political economy. They are nothing but laws of society. The conferences of social reformers, the congresses for international statistics and for social science bear witness of its force. Everywhere we hear of the development of the constitution, of public law, of public opinion, of institutions, of forms of society, of theories of history. In a word, whatever views of history may be inculcated on the Universities by novelists or epigrammatists, it is certain that the best intellects and spirits of our day are labouring to see more of that invariable order, and of that principle of growth in the life of human societies and of the great society of mankind which nearly all men, more or less, acknowledge, and partially and unconsciously confirm.' This passage expresses admirably, I think, the tendencies of modern thought for good and evil. For good. For surely it is good, and a thing to thank God for, that men should be more and more expecting order, searching for order, welcoming order. But for evil also. For young sciences, like young men, have their time of wonder, hope, imagination, and of passion too, and haste, and bigotry. Dazzled, and that pardonably, by the beauty of the few laws they may have discovered, they are too apt to erect them into gods, and to explain by them all matters in heaven and earth; and apt, too, as I think this author does, to patch them where they are weakest, by that most dangerous succedaneum of vague and grand epithets, which very often contain, each of them, an assumption far more important than the law to which they are tacked. Such surely are the words which so often occur in this passage--'Invariable, continual, immutable, inevitable, irresistible.' There is an ambiguity in these words, which may lead--which I believe does lead--to most unphilosophical conclusions. They are used very much as synonyms; not merely in this passage, but in the mouths of men. Are you aware that those who carelessly do so, blink the whole of the world- old arguments between necessity and free-will? Whatever may be the rights of that quarrel, they are certainly not to be assumed in a passing epithet. But what else does the writer do, who tells us that an inevitable sequence, an irresistible growth, exists in the moral as well as in the physical world; and then says, as a seemingly identical statement, that it is the crown of philosophy to see immutable law, even in the complex action of human life?