table fashion, and to betray
magic affinities to what is separated from them by apparent chasms. The
types of relation which the mind may observe are multifarious. Any
chance conjunction, any incidental harmony, will start a hypothesis
about the nature of the universe and be the parent image of a whole
system of philosophy. In self-indulgent minds most of these standard
images are dramatic, and the cue men follow in unravelling experience is
that offered by some success or failure of their own. The sanguine,
having once found a pearl in a dunghill, feel a glorious assurance that
the world's true secret is that everything in the end is ordered for
everybody's benefit--and that is optimism. The atrabilious, being ill at
ease with themselves, see the workings everywhere of insidious sin, and
conceive that the world is a dangerous place of trial. A somewhat more
observant intellect may decide that what exists is a certain number of
definite natures, each striving to preserve and express itself; and in
such language we still commonly read political events and our friend's
actions. At the dawn of science a Thales, observing the ways and the
conditions of things somewhat more subtly, will notice that rain,
something quite adventitious to the fields, is what covers them with
verdure, that the slime breeds life, that a liquid will freeze to stone
and melt to air; and his shrewd conclusion will be that everything is
water in one disguise or another. It is only after long accumulated
observation that we can reach any exact law of nature; and this law we
hardly think of applying to living things. These have not yet revealed
the secret of their structure, and clear insight is vouchsafed us only
in such regions as that of mathematical physics, where cogency in the
ideal system is combined with adequacy to explain the phenomena.

[Sidenote: Mechanism for the most part hidden.]

These exact sciences cover in the gross the field in which human life
appears, the antecedents of this life, and its instruments. To a
speculative mind, that had retained an ingenuous sense of nature's
inexhaustible resources and of man's essential continuity with other
natural things, there could be no ground for doubting that similar
principles (could they be traced in detail) would be seen to preside
over all man's action and passion. A thousand indications, drawn from
introspection and from history, would be found to confirm this
speculative presumption. I