find indeed, in our own imaginations, as long as
we sit with a book in our studies: but which vanishes the moment that we
step outside into practical contact with life; and, instead of talking
cheerfully of a necessary and orderly progress, find ourselves more
inclined to cry with the cynical man of the world:

'All the windy ways of men,
Are but dust that rises up;
And is lightly laid again.'

The usual rejoinder to this argument is to fall back upon man's weakness
and ignorance, and to take refuge in the infinite unknown. Man, it is
said, may of course interfere a little with some of the less important
laws of his being: but who is he, to grapple with the more vast and
remote ones? Because he can prevent a pebble from falling, is he to
suppose that he can alter the destiny of nations, and grapple forsooth
with 'the eternities and the immensities,' and so forth? The argument is
very powerful: but addrest rather to the imagination than the reason. It
is, after all, another form of the old omne ignotum pro magnifico; and we
may answer, I think fairly--About the eternities and immensities we know
nothing, not having been there as yet; but it is a mere assumption to
suppose, without proof, that the more remote and impalpable laws are more
vast, in the sense of being more powerful (the only sense which really
bears upon the argument), than the laws which are palpably at work around
us all day long; and if we are capable of interfering with almost every
law of human life which we know of already, it is more philosophical to
believe (till disproved by actual failure) that we can interfere with
those laws of our life which we may know hereafter. Whether it will pay
us to interfere with them, is a different question. It is not prudent to
interfere with the laws of health, and it may not be with other laws,
hereafter to be discovered. I am only pleading that man can disobey the
laws of his being; that such power has always been a disturbing force in
the progress of the human race, which modern theories too hastily
overlook; and that the science of history (unless the existence of the
human will be denied) must belong rather to the moral sciences, than to
that 'positive science' which seems to me inclined to reduce all human
phaenomena under physical laws, hastily assumed, by the old fallacy of
[Greek text], to apply where there is no proof whatsoever that they do or
even can apply.

As for the question of t