if there be a God, runs in a somewhat
parallel case. The great philosopher of antiquity, when he would enumerate
the causes of the things that take place in the world, after making
mention of those which he considered to be physical and material, adds,
"and the mind and everything which is by means of man."(8) Certainly; it
would have been a preposterous course, when he would trace the effects he
saw around him to their respective sources, had he directed his exclusive
attention upon some one class or order of originating principles, and
ascribed to these everything which happened anywhere. It would indeed have
been unworthy a genius so curious, so penetrating, so fertile, so
analytical as Aristotle's, to have laid it down that everything on the
face of the earth could be accounted for by the material sciences, without
the hypothesis of moral agents. It is incredible that in the investigation
of physical results he could ignore so influential a being as man, or
forget that, not only brute force and elemental movement, but knowledge
also is power. And this so much the more, inasmuch as moral and spiritual
agents belong to another, not to say a higher, order than physical; so
that the omission supposed would not have been merely an oversight in
matters of detail, but a philosophical error, and a fault in division.

However, we live in an age of the world when the career of science and
literature is little affected by what was done, or would have been done,
by this venerable authority; so, we will suppose, in England or Ireland,
in the middle of the nineteenth century, a set of persons of name and
celebrity to meet together, in spite of Aristotle, in order to adopt a
line of proceeding which they conceive the circumstances of the time
render imperative. We will suppose that a difficulty just now besets the
enunciation and discussion of all matters of science, in consequence of
the extreme sensitiveness of large classes of the community, clergy and
laymen, on the subjects of necessity, responsibility, the standard of
morals, and the nature of virtue. Parties run so high, that the only way
of avoiding constant quarrelling in defence of this or that side of the
question is, in the judgment of the persons I am supposing, to shut up the
subject of anthropology altogether. This is accordingly done. Henceforth
man is to be as if he were not, in the general course of Education; the
moral and mental sciences are to have no professori