612 CAREER OF MAN. 



ties depend on the same motives as the movements of individuals, being 

 indeed the sum of individual determinations. But when multitudes and 

 masses are thus brought under our consideration, the element of free-will 

 seems for the most part to disappear, and events assume an air of pre- 

 destination. To this principle it is that history owes its chief value, and 

 truly becomes, as is often said, philosophy teaching by example. The 

 intelligent man who lived twenty centuries ago would doubtless have 

 come to the same decision which is reached by the intelligent man of our 

 times ; the same propositions being submitted to both, both guiding 

 themselves by similar principles to a like result. The logic of truth is 

 eternal, for it is the expression of the manner of action of our cerebral ap- 

 paratus, the type of which never changes ; and since there is thus no 

 essential change in the typical construction of man, and therefore none 

 in the manner of operation of his mental processes, since physical nature 

 Definiteness of i g unvarying, and the events of life spring one out of another 

 his career. j n a regular order or sequence, there must arise those same 

 analogies in the history of race compared with race, and nation compared 

 with nation, that are so obvious when individual is compared with indi- 

 vidual. Of every great future event there is therefore a past history, for 

 every such event has had its precedent in other histories, and therefore 

 its prognostic. Things will follow in a definite order so long as the in- 

 fluences of external nature are the same, and so long as the construction 

 of the human brain is the same. 



The political foresight of the most eminent statesmen depends on a 

 gift of appreciating national mental types, like that possessed by great 

 sculptors or painters of appreciating a standard of beauty. It is this 

 which enables them to foresee the probable consequences of events, and 

 to realize the expected action of individuals, and even of masses of 

 men. In such actions there is far more uniformity than is commonly 

 supposed. The same general conditions which yield to the post-office 

 a definite percentage of misdirected letters every year which, with mar- 

 velous fidelity, give to the hospitals, the jails, the bills of mortality, their 

 expected numbers, operate from age to age, and in one nation as in an- 

 other, and hence arises that appearance of fate in the action of masses 

 to which we have alluded; hence also it is that the same cycle of 

 events re-occurs again and again, diversified, perhaps, but never essen- 

 tially changed by the influence of individual free-will. As the compar- 

 ative anatomist exhibits, in the different members of the living series, 

 their common points of resemblance that this organ in one animal is 

 the homologue of that in another, and this function the analogue of that, 

 so the philosophical statesman, acknowledging the essential principle of 

 comparative history, reasons from nation to nation and from age to age. 



