 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 direction
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 acted 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
anyone, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and
being thus unable to generalize 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 possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling
of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.
    For the future depends upon the present and the present (whose existence is
only one of those minor compromises of which human life is full - for it lives
only on sufferance of the past and future) depends upon the past, and the past
is unalterable. The only reason why we cannot see the future as plainly as the
past, is because we know too little of the actual past and actual present; these
things are too great for us, otherwise the future, in its minutest details,
would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose our sense of time
present by reason of the clearness with which we should see the past and future;
perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is
foreign. What we do know is, that the more the past and present are known, the
more the future can be predicted; and that no one dreams of doubting the fixity
of the future in cases where he is fully cognisant of both past and present, and
has had experience of the consequences that followed from such a past and such a
present on previous occasions. He perfectly well knows what will happen, and
will stake his whole fortune thereon.
    And this is a great blessing; for it is the foundation
