f then, as it seems to me, the history of mankind depended merely
on physical laws, analogous to those which govern the rest of nature, it
would be a hopeless task for us to discover an inevitable sequence in
History, even though we might suppose that such existed. But as long as
man has the mysterious power of breaking the laws of his own being, such
a sequence not only cannot be discovered, but it cannot exist. For man
can break the laws of his own being, whether physical, intellectual, or
moral. He breaks them every day, and has always been breaking them.

The greater number of them he cannot obey till he knows them. And too
many of them he cannot know, alas, till he has broken them; and paid the
penalty of his ignorance. He does not, like the brute or the vegetable,
thrive by laws of which he is not conscious: but by laws of which he
becomes gradually conscious; and which he can disobey after all. And
therefore it seems to me very like a juggle of words to draw analogies
from the physical and irrational world, and apply them to the moral and
rational world; and most unwise to bridge over the gulf between the two
by such adjectives as 'irresistible' or 'inevitable,' such nouns as
'order, sequence, law'--which must bear an utterly different meaning,
according as they are applied to physical beings or to moral ones.

Indeed, so patent is the ambiguity, that I cannot fancy that it has
escaped the author and his school; and am driven, by mere respect for
their logical powers, to suppose that they mean no ambiguity at all; that
they do not conceive of irrational beings as differing from rational
beings, or the physical from the moral, or the body of man from his
spirit, in kind and property; and that the immutable laws which they
represent as governing human life and history have nothing at all to do
with those laws of right and wrong, which I intend to set forth to you,
as the 'everlasting judgments of God.'

In which case, I fear, they must go their way; while we go ours;
confessing that there is an order, and there is a law, for man; and that
if he disturb that order, or break that law in anywise, they will prove
themselves too strong for him, and reassert themselves, and go forward,
grinding him to powder if he stubbornly try to stop their way. But we
must assert too, that his disobedience to them, even for a moment, has
disturbed the natural course of events, and broken that inevitable
sequence, which we may