eep as much as his skill and physical strength enable
him to do. But society and its benefits are all so much ground won from
nature and her state. The more natural a method of acquisition, the less
likely is it to be social. The essence of morality is the subjugation of
nature in obedience to social needs. To use Kant's admirable
description, concert _pathologically_ extorted by the mere necessities
of situation, is exalted into a _moral_ union. It is exactly in this
progressive substitution of one for the other that advancement consists,
that Progress of the Species at which, in certain of its forms, Mr.
Carlyle has so many gibes.

That, surely, is the true test of veracity and heroism in conduct. Does
your hero's achievement go in the pathological or the moral direction?
Does it tend to spread faith in that cunning, violence, force, which
were once primitive and natural conditions of life, and which will still
by natural law work to their own proper triumphs in so far as these
conditions survive, and within such limits, and in such sense, as they
permit; or, on the contrary, does it tend to heighten respect for civic
law, for pledged word, for the habit of self-surrender to the public
good, and for all those other ideas and sentiments and usages which have
been painfully gained from the sterile sands of egotism and selfishness,
and to which we are indebted for all the untold boons conferred by the
social union on man?

Viewed from this point, the manner of the achievement is as important as
is its immediate product, a consideration which it is one of Mr.
Carlyle's most marked peculiarities to take into small account.
Detesting Jesuitism from the bottom of his soul, he has been too willing
to accept its fundamental maxim, that the end justifies the means. He
has taken the end for the ratification or proscription of the means, and
stamped it as the verdict of Fate and Fact on the transaction and its
doer. A safer position is this, that the means prepare the end, and the
end is what the means have made it. Here is the limit of the true law of
the relations between man and fate. Justice and injustice in the law,
let us abstain from inquiring after.

There are two sets of relations which have still to be regulated in some
degree by the primitive and pathological principle of repression and
main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal
and vicious persons, whose unsocial propensities are consta