754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



approval and admiration of great and good deeds. The highest and 

 noblest action results never from conscious choice, but springs uncon- 

 sciously from the force of noble character — "instinctively," as we 

 sometimes say. Of Cato, it was said that he was good because he 

 could not be otherwise. So far from lessening the excellence of con- 

 duct that noble motives act always with ii-resistible force upon great 

 men, that is the chief reason for honoring them, because they at least 

 could not act ignobly. " Here I stand," said Luther, at Worms, " God 

 help me, Ich kann nicht anders ! " This is the key-note of noble 

 action everywhere, " I can not otherwise ! " The engineer, at New 

 Hamburgh, hesitating not a moment when duty called him to a horri- 

 ble death ; the captain of the sinking steamer who will not leave the 

 ship until every passenger is safe, and so goes down with her ; Arnold 

 Winkelried crying, " Make way for liberty ! " and rushing upon the 

 Austrian spears ; Sir Philip Sidney, mortally wounded, taking from 

 his parched lips the water brought him, that a poor soldier, who looked 

 longingly with dying eyes at the cup, might first drink ; the martyrs 

 who have chosen to suffer ignominy and death that we might have 

 freedom of thought and speech — these are types of men humanity will 

 ever honor ; their example and memory we shall reverence even though 

 we know — rather because we know — that the needle points not more 

 surely to the pole tlian that for them, there and then, meanness was 

 impossible — that their great souls were only capable of noble deeds. 



EXPERIMENTAL LEGISLATION. 



By Peofessob W. STANLEY JEVONS. 



" A FOOL, Mr. Edgeworth, is one who has never made an experi- 

 -LJl. ment." Such are, I believe, the exact words of the remark 

 which Erasmus Darwin addressed to Richard Lovell Edgeworth. 

 They deserve to become proverbial. They have the broad foundation 

 of truth and the trenchant disregard of accuracy in detail which mark 

 an adage. Of course, the saying at once suggests the question. What 

 is an experiment ? In a certain way, all people, whether fools or wise 

 men, are constantly making experiments. The education of the infant 

 is thoroughly experimental from the very first, only in a hap-hazard 

 and unconscious way. The child which overbalances itself in learning 

 to walk is experimenting on the law of gravity. All successful action 

 is successful experiment, in the broadest sense of the term, and every 

 mistake or failure is a negative experiment, which deters us from repe- 

 tition. Our mental framework, too, is marvelously contrived, so as to 

 go on ceaselessly registering on the tablets of the memory the favor- 

 able or unfavorable results of every kind of action. Charles Babbage 



