here all beings are incessantly acting on one another, and
which is itself only one eternal round of movement, imparted and
undergone, according to necessary laws. In a storm of dust raised by a
whirlwind, in the most violent tempest that agitates the ocean, not a
single molecule of dust or of water finds its place by _chance_; or is
without an adequate cause for occupying the precise point where it is
found. So, again, in the terrible convulsions that sometimes overthrow
empires, there is not a single action, word, thought, volition, or
passion in a single agent of such a revolution, whether he be a
destroyer or a victim, which is not necessary, which does not act
precisely as it must act, and which does not infallibly produce the
effects that it is bound to produce, conformably to the place occupied
by the given agent in the moral whirlwind.[152]

[152] Almost the very words of this passage are to be found in
Diderot. See above, vol. i. p. 237.

_Order and disorder are abstract terms, and can have no existence in a
Nature, where all is necessary and follows constant laws._ Order is
nothing more than necessity viewed relatively to the succession of
actions. Disorder in the case of any being is nothing more than its
passage to a new order; to a succession of movements and actions of a
different sort from those of which the given being was previously
susceptible. Hence there can never be either monsters or prodigies,
either marvels or miracles, in nature. By the same reasoning, we have no
right to divide the workings of nature into those of Intelligence and
those of Chance. Where all is necessary, Chance can mean nothing save
the limitation of man's knowledge.

The writer next has a group of chapters (vi.-x.) on Man, his
composition, relations, and destiny. The chief propositions are in
rigorous accord with the general conceptions that have already been set
forth. All that man does, and all that passes in him, are effects of the
energy that is common to him with the other beings known to us. But,
before a true and comprehensive idea of the unity of nature was possible
to him, he was so seized by the variety and complication of his organism
and its movements that it never came into his mind to realise that they
existed in a chain of material necessity, binding him fast to all other
forces and modes of being. Men think that they remedy their ignorance of
things by inventing words; so they explained the working of