on the Universities by
novelists or epigrammatists, it is certain that the best intellects and
spirits of our day are labouring to see more of that invariable order,
and of that principle of growth in the life of human societies and of the
great society of mankind which nearly all men, more or less, acknowledge,
and partially and unconsciously confirm.'

This passage expresses admirably, I think, the tendencies of modern
thought for good and evil.

For good. For surely it is good, and a thing to thank God for, that men
should be more and more expecting order, searching for order, welcoming
order. But for evil also. For young sciences, like young men, have
their time of wonder, hope, imagination, and of passion too, and haste,
and bigotry. Dazzled, and that pardonably, by the beauty of the few laws
they may have discovered, they are too apt to erect them into gods, and
to explain by them all matters in heaven and earth; and apt, too, as I
think this author does, to patch them where they are weakest, by that
most dangerous succedaneum of vague and grand epithets, which very often
contain, each of them, an assumption far more important than the law to
which they are tacked.

Such surely are the words which so often occur in this
passage--'Invariable, continual, immutable, inevitable, irresistible.'
There is an ambiguity in these words, which may lead--which I believe
does lead--to most unphilosophical conclusions. They are used very much
as synonyms; not merely in this passage, but in the mouths of men. Are
you aware that those who carelessly do so, blink the whole of the world-
old arguments between necessity and free-will? Whatever may be the
rights of that quarrel, they are certainly not to be assumed in a passing
epithet. But what else does the writer do, who tells us that an
inevitable sequence, an irresistible growth, exists in the moral as well
as in the physical world; and then says, as a seemingly identical
statement, that it is the crown of philosophy to see immutable law, even
in the complex action of human life?

The crown of philosophy? Doubtless it is so. But not a crown, I should
have thought, which has been reserved as the special glory of these
latter days. Very early, at least in the known history of mankind, did
Philosophy (under the humble names of Religion and Common Sense) see most
immutable, and even eternal, laws, in the complex action of human life,
even the laws of right and wrong;