human
nature, the real laws of human history, from these critical periods, when
the root-fibres of the human heart are laid bare, for good and evil, than
from any smooth and respectable periods of peace and plenty: nevertheless
their lessons are not statistical, but moral.

But if human folly has been a disturbing force for evil, surely human
reason has been a disturbing force for good. Man can not only disobey
the laws of his being, he can also choose between them, to an extent
which science widens every day, and so become, what he was meant to be,
an artificial being; artificial in his manufactures, habits, society,
polity--what not? All day long he has a free choice between even
physical laws, which mere things have not, and which make the laws of
mere things inapplicable to him. Take the simplest case. If he falls
into the water, he has his choice whether he will obey the laws of
gravity and sink, or by other laws perform the (to him) artificial
process of swimming, and get ashore. True, both would happen by law: but
he has his choice which law shall conquer, sink or swim. We have yet to
learn why whole nations, why all mankind may not use the same prudential
power as to which law they shall obey,--which, without breaking it, they
shall conquer and repress, as long as seems good to them.

It is true, nature must be obeyed in order that she may he conquered: but
then she is to be CONQUERED. It has been too much the fashion of late to
travestie that great dictum of Bacon's into a very different one, and
say, Nature must be obeyed because she cannot be conquered; thus
proclaiming the impotence of science to discover anything save her own
impotence--a result as contrary to fact, as to Bacon's own hopes of what
science would do for the welfare of the human race. For what is all
human invention, but the transcending and conquering one natural law by
another? What is the practical answer which all mankind has been making
to nature and her pretensions, whenever it has progressed one step since
the foundation of the world: by which all discoverers have discovered,
all teachers taught: by which all polities, kingdoms, civilizations,
arts, manufactures, have established themselves; all who have raised
themselves above the mob have faced the mob, and conquered the mob,
crucified by them first and worshipped by them afterwards: by which the
first savage conquered the natural law which put wild beasts in the
forest, by