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 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
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.
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