ly form developing, and with
it his intellectual powers. At about fifteen years, in consequence of
the evolution which special parts of his system had attained, his moral
character changed. New ideas, new passions, influenced him. And that
that was the cause, and this the effect, is demonstrated when, by the
skill of the surgeon, those parts have been interfered with. Nor does
the development, the metamorphosis, end here; it requires many years
for the body to reach its full perfection, many years for the mind. A
culmination is at length reached, and then there is a decline. I need
not picture its mournful incidents--the corporeal, the intellectual
enfeeblement. Perhaps there is little exaggeration in saying that in
less than a century every human being on the face of the globe, if not
cut off in an untimely manner, has passed through all these changes.

Is there for each of us a providential intervention as we thus pass
from stage to stage of life? or shall we not rather believe that the
countless myriads of human beings who have peopled the earth have been
under the guidance of an unchanging, a universal law?

But individuals are the elementary constituents of communities--nations.
They maintain therein a relation like that which the particles of the
body maintain to the body itself. These, introduced into it, commence
and complete their function; they die, and are dismissed.

Like the individual, the nation comes into existence without its own
knowledge, and dies without its own consent, often against its own will.
National life differs in no particular from individual, except in this,
that it is spread over a longer span, but no nation can escape its
inevitable term. Each, if its history be well considered, shows its
time of infancy, its time of youth, its time of maturity, its time of
decline, if its phases of life be completed.

In the phases of existence of all, so far as those phases are
completed, there are common characteristics, and, as like accordances in
individuals point out that all are living under a reign of law, we
are justified in inferring that the course of nations, and indeed the
progress of humanity, does not take place in a chance or random way,
that supernatural interventions never break the chain of historic acts,
that every historic event has its warrant in some preceding event, and
gives warrant to others that are to follow..

But this conclusion is the essential principle of Stoicism--th