A dread (half-unconscious, it may be) of this last practical result, seems to have crossed the mind of the author on whom I have been commenting; for he confesses, honestly enough (and he writes throughout like an honest man) that in human life 'no rational thinker hopes to discover more than some few primary actions of law, and some approximative theory of growth.' I have higher hopes of a possible science of history; because I fall back on those old moral laws, which I think he wishes to ignore: but I can conceive that he will not; because he cannot, on his own definitions of law and growth. They are (if I understand him aright) to be irresistible and inevitable. I say that they are not so, even in the case of trees and stones; much more in the world of man. Facts, when he goes on to verify his theories, will leave him with a very few primary actions of law, a very faint approximative theory; because his theories, in plain English, will not work. At the first step, at every step, they are stopped short by those disturbing forces, or at least disturbed phaenomena, which have been as yet, and probably will be hereafter, attributed (as the only explanation of them) to the existence, for good and evil, of a human will. Let us look in detail at a few of these disturbances of anything like inevitable or irresistible movement. Shall we not, at the very first glance, confess--I am afraid only too soon--that there always have been fools therein; fools of whom no man could guess, or can yet, what they were going to do next or why they were going to do it? And how, pray, can we talk of the inevitable, in the face of that one miserable fact of human folly, whether of ignorance or of passion, folly still? There may be laws of folly, as there are laws of disease; and whether there are or not, we may learn much wisdom from folly; we may see what the true laws of humanity are, by seeing the penalties which come from breaking them: but as for laws which work of themselves, by an irresistible movement,--how can we discover such in a past in which every law which we know has been outraged again and again? Take one of the highest instances--the progress of the human intellect--I do not mean just now the spread of conscious science, but of that unconscious science which we call common sense. What hope have we of laying down exact laws for its growth, in a world wherein it has been ignored, insulted, crushed, a thousand times, sometimes in whole nations and for whole generations, by the stupidity, tyranny, greed, caprice of a single ruler; or if not so, yet by the mere superstition, laziness, sensuality, anarchy of the mob? How, again, are we to arrive at any exact laws of the increase of population, in a race which has had, from the beginning, the abnormal and truly monstrous habit of slaughtering each other, not for food--for in a race of normal cannibals, the ratio of increase or decrease might easily