ectibility. An animal that has rigid instincts and
an _a priori_ mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world
he comes into: his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use;
unless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or
by natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be
reconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the
animal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality
offers. So long as such a creature lives--and his life will be
difficult and short--events will continually disconcert and puzzle
him; everything will seem to him unaccountable, inexplicable,
unnatural. He will not be able to conceive the real order and
connection of things sympathetically, by assimilating his habits of
thought to their habits of evolution. His faculties being innate and
unadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms;
he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness. What
contradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict
reason, beauty, and necessity. In this paradoxical situation he will
probably take refuge in the conviction that what he finds to exist is
an illusion, or at least not a fair sample of reality. Being so
perverse, absurd, and repugnant, the given state of things must be, he
will say, only accidental and temporary. He will be sure that his own
_a priori_ imagination is the mirror of all the eternal proprieties,
and that as his mind can move only in one predetermined way, things
cannot be prevented from moving in that same way save by some strange
violence done to their nature. It would be easy, therefore, to set
everything right again: nay, everything must be on the point of
righting itself spontaneously. Wrong, of its very essence, must be in
unstable equilibrium. The conflict between what such a man feels ought
to exist and what he finds actually existing must, he will feel sure,
end by a speedy revolution in things, and by the removal of all
scandals; that it should end by the speedy removal of his own person,
or by such a revolution in his demands as might reconcile him to
existence, will never occur to him; or, if the thought occurs to him,
it will seem too horrible to be true.

Such a creature cannot adapt himself to things by education, and
consequently he cannot adapt things to himself by industry. His choice
lies absolutely between victory and martyrdom. But at the very moment
o