MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS. 251 



us, we cannot be surprised at the irregularities attending 

 human conduct. It is simply the penalty paid for the 

 superior endowment. It is here that the so-called imper- 

 fection of our nature resides. Causality and conscientiousness 

 are, it is true, guides over all; but even these are only 

 faculties of the same indefinite potentiality as the rest, and 

 partake accordingly of the same inequality of action. Man is 

 therefore a piece of mechanism, which never can act so as to 

 satisfy his own ideas of what he might be for he can 

 imagine a state of moral perfection, (as he can imagine a 

 globe formed of diamonds, pearls, and rubies,) though his 

 constitution forbids him to realize it. There ever will, in the 

 best disposed and most disciplined minds, be occasional dis- 

 crepancies between the amount of temptation and the power 

 summoned for regulation or resistance, or between the 

 stimulus and the mobility of the faculty; and hence those 

 errors, and shortcomings, and excesses, without end, with 

 which the good are constantly finding cause to charge them- 

 selves. There is at the same time even here a possibility of 

 improvement. In infancy, the impulses are all of them 

 irregular ; a child is cruel, cunning, and false, under the 

 slightest temptation, but in time learns to control these incli- 

 nations, and to be habitually humane, frank, and truthful. 

 So is human society, in its earliest stages, sanguinary, 

 aggressive, and deceitful, but in time, becomes just, faithful, 

 and benevolent. To such improvements there is a natural 

 tendency which will operate in all fair circumstances, though 

 it is not to be expected that irregular and undue impulses 

 will ever be altogether banished from the system. 



It may still be a puzzle to many, how beings should be 

 born into the world whose organization is such that they 

 unavoidably, even in a civilised country, become malefactors. 

 Does God, it may be asked, make criminals? Does he 

 fashion certain beings with a predestination to evil ? He 

 does not do so ; and yet the criminal type of brain, as it is 

 called, comes into existence in accordance with laws which 

 the Deity has established. It is not, however, as the result of 

 the first or general intention of those laws, but as an exception 



