e resultant and exponent of all the forces that have been
brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards. His
action at any moment depends solely upon his constitution, and on the
intensity and direction of the various agencies to which he is, and has
been, subjected. Some of these will counteract each other; but as he is
by nature, and as he has been acted on, and is now acted on from without,
so will he do, as certainly and regularly as though he were a machine.

"We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature
of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a
part, and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very
roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe
much both of a man's character and actions to chance, or luck, or
fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our
own ignorance; and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring
flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as
much the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any
possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead
leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.

"For the future depends upon the present, and the present (whose
existence is only one of those minor compromises of which human life is
full--for it lives only on sufferance of the past and future) depends
upon the past, and the past is unalterable. The only reason why we
cannot see the future as plainly as the past, is because we know too
little of the actual past and actual present; these things are too great
for us, otherwise the future, in its minutest details, would lie spread
out before our eyes, and we should lose our sense of time present by
reason of the clearness with which we should see the past and future;
perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all; but that
is foreign. What we do know is, that the more the past and present are
known, the more the future can be predicted; and that no one dreams of
doubting the fixity of the future in cases where he is fully cognisant of
both past and present, and has had experience of the consequences that
followed from such a past and such a present on previous occasions. He
perfectly well knows what will happen, and will stake his whole fortune
thereon.

"And this is a great blessing; for it is the foundation on which mor