MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS. 237 



time that his ordinary mental manifestations are looked upon 

 as simple phenomena resulting from organization, those of the 

 lower animals being phenomena absolutely the same in cha- 

 racter, though developed within narrower limits^ 95 ) 



What has chiefly tended to take mind, in the eyes of 

 learned and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its 

 apparently irregular and wayward character. How different 

 the manifestations in different beings ! how unstable in all ! 

 at one time so calm, at another so wild and impulsive ! It 

 seemed impossible that anything so subtle and aberrant could 

 be part of a system, the main features of which are regularity 

 and precision. But the irregularity of mental phenomena is 

 only in appearance. When we give up the individual, and 

 take the mass, we find as much uniformity of result as in any 

 other class of natural phenomena. The irregularity is exactly 

 of the same kind as that of the weather. Xo man can say 

 what may be the weather of to-morrow ; but the quantity of 

 rain which falls in any particular place in any five years is 

 precisely the same as the quantity which falls in any other 

 five years at the same place. Thus, while it is absolutely 

 impossible to predict of any one Frenchman that during next 

 year he will commit a crime, it is quite certain that about 

 one in every six hundred and fifty of the French people will 

 do so, because in past years the proportion has generally been 

 about that amount, the tendencies to crime in relation to the 

 temptations being everywhere invariable over a sufficiently 

 wide range of time. So also, the number of persons taken in 

 charge by the police in London for being drunk and dis- 

 orderly in the streets, is, week by week, a nearly uniform 

 quantity, showing that the inclination to drink to excess is 

 always in the mass about the same, regard being had to the 

 existing temptations or stimulations to this vice. Even mis- 

 takes and oversights are of regular recurrence, for it "is found 

 in the post-offices of large cities, that the number of letters 

 put in without addresses is year by year the same. Statistics 

 has ascertained an equally distinct regularity in a wide range, 

 with regard to many other things concerning the mind, and 

 the doctrine founded upon it has lately produced a scheme 



