What is there in this whole world, or in the worlds beyond it, which has a will of its own? The Unknown and Unknowable only!
‘A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces
that have been brought to bear upon him, whether before
his birth or afterwards. His action at any moment depends
solely upon his constitution, and on the intensity and di-
rection of the various agencies to which he is, and has been,
subjected. Some of these will counteract each other; but as
he is by nature, and as he has been acted on, and is now act-
ed on from without, so will he do, as certainly and regularly
as though he were a machine.
‘We do not generally admit this, because we do not know
the whole nature of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable
to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny
that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much
both of a man’s character and actions to chance, or luck, or
fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the
admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will
teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or
the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing
that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibil-
ity arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead
leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.
2087
germansingergirl
jbbartram-illu
titsay
janainaart