and not to the past which every day renders more inaccessible and remote.

The love of liberty, together with preconceptionsof freewill, virtue, and responsibility, have often retarded the recognition of law, and many still fear to admit its omnipresence lest the universe should lose its godlike character, and assume the aspect of a cold, lifeless mechanism, in which man's noblest aspirations and purest affections are only like the cogs and pinions that go to make up the fabric of a mill. A more intimate acquaintance with the subject will calm these fears, and show that freedom is not less a reality because it is exercised within limits, and according to unvarying princi ples susceptible of elucidation. Humboldt defines science as "the labour of mind applied to nature," and reminds us that the external world has no real existence for us beyond the image reflected within ourselves through the medium of the senses. It is only by the arduous exercise of our senses that we increase our acquaintance with the external world, and it is only in proportion as mental operations, sometimes spontaneous, but often toilsome, lead to their becoming the subjects of consciousness, that we grow acquainted with the facts of the world that lies within us. We should therefore expect that science will continually unfold new

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views, many of which will not harmonize with previous opinions; but no belief worth retaining will suffer from the discovery of unanticipated truth.

The way in which natural laws invest man with strength, and at the same time impose a limitation upon the exercise of his functions, will be best understood by commencing with the consideration of physical circumstances. Human life, as we see it around us, is connected with, and dependent upon, an organization only capable of existing under certain physical conditions, and is destroyed by comparatively slight changes of temperature or alteration of chemical surroundings. Thus, as a rule, men and animals of the class of mammalia die if the internal temperature of their bodies reaches 111°, the heat natural to birds; and no human beings could exist like the larvæ of certain tipula which have been found in springs approaching the boiling-point, or like caterpillars, whose vitality was only suspended, not destroyed, in one of Ross's arctic voyages, by exposure to a temperature of 40° below zero, which reduced them to lumps of ice that chinked when thrown into a tumbler. Here we see that human life, although a thing of freedom, is free through the operation of laws that forbid its maintenance under conditions well enough suited to other forms of being.

The adaptation of the size and density of the earth to human capacities affords another view of man's dependence upon physical laws. In the sun, which is three or four hundred thousand times as heavy as the earth, a falling body would move with the velocity of a cannon-ball, and objects could only be lifted by twenty-eight times the power necessary on our globe. If therefore man had been placed upon the sun, and had been able to exist there, the long chain of industrial operations that have led to civilization could never have taken place, because there would have been too great a disproportion between the difficulties to be overcome and the means of dealing with them.

Comparatively slight changes in the crust of our globe would have had analogous results: the depression of Africa below the sea, and the elevation of a great continent with high mountain ranges near the north pole, would have condemned Europe to sterility and barbarism. A few thousand feet upward movement would convert the fertile land of the temperate zones into regions where not only the vine and the olive, but corn and fruit trees would disappear; and a few thousand feet higher they would become abodes of desolation, covered with eternal ice and snow, where the simplest cellular plants would bear the only testi

mony

that life was still abroad. No one finds any difficulty in appreciating this reasoning, or in admitting that no great manifestation of human powers, whether intellectual or moral, could have arisen under physical circumstances so full of difficulty and so destitute of encouragement. But society is only now beginning to perceive that it is quite as reasonable to expect that plays like those of Shakspeare, paintings like those of Raphael, together with roads, docks, and railways, should be produced in the wastes of Siberia, as that satisfactory human characters could be developed in the dismal wildernesses of crime and squalor that exist in the midst of our boasted civilization. In the present semi-rational condition of society the influence of circumstances on the formation of character, and of surroundings upon the exhibition of qualities, is freely admitted in some directions, and capriciously ignored or denied in others.

Most people believe in the expediency of training up a child in the way he should go, and no one doubts that a better result will arise from this process than from the opposite one, of training up a child in the way he should not go. Still the well-born, well-trained, well-situated people receive, if wealthy, high-flown compliments on their superior virtue, by which merit is meant; while

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the aberrations of those who have been badly born, badly trained, and badly situated, are ascribed to depravity in the sense of guilt. The fact is, that man's power of resisting or counteracting surrounding influences, or forces, is limited in the moral world just as it is in the physical, and it is as impossible to grow a number of good characters under evil conditions, as to produce the fruits of the sunny tropics in the gloomy winter of the poles. Human character and action are not exclusively dependent upon influences that spring from within, nor are they upon those which have their origin from without, but both work conjointly and in certain correlations. Under many old forms of benevolence this was not seen, and it was thought enough was done if a good doctrine was conveyed to a bad soul; now, the connection between the physical and the spiritual is more clearly perceived, and efforts are directed to arrange a set of conditions favourable to the production of beneficial results. These views must not be confounded with the Owenite dogma, that "a man's character is formed for him, and not by him ;" and it is worthy of remark that Owen himself taught the fallacy of his own philosophy, when he invited people to join in efforts to place themselves under circumstances that would de