266 VESTIGES OF THE 



what in reason we would expect. We cannot conceive 

 that so vast a system could have been created for a 

 contrary purpose. No averagely constituted human 

 being would, in his own limited sphere of action, think 

 of producing a similar system upon an opposite principle. 

 But to form so vast a range of being, and to make being 

 everywhere a source of gratification, is conformable to 

 our ideas of a Creator in whom we are constantly 

 discovering traits of a nature, of which our own is but 

 a faint and far-cast shadow at the best. 



It appears at first difficult to reconcile with this idea 

 the many miseries which we see all sentient beings, 

 ourselves included, occasionally enduring. How, the 

 sage has asked in every age, should a Being so trans- 

 cendently kind, have allowed of so large an admixture of 

 evil in the condition of his creatures? Do we not at 

 length find an answer to a certain extent satisfactory, 

 in the view which has now been given of the constitution 

 of nature ? We there see the Deity operating in the 

 most august of his works by fixed laws, an arrangement 

 which, it is clear, only admits of the main and primary 

 results being good, but disregards exceptions. Now the 

 mechanical laws are so definite in their purposes, that no 

 exceptions ever take place in that department • if there 

 is a certain quantity of nebulous matter to be agglome- 

 rated and divided and set in motion as a planetary 

 system, it will be so with hair's-breadth accuracy, and 

 cannot be otherwise. But the laws presiding over 

 meteorology, life, and mind, are necessarily less definite, 

 as they have to produce a great variety of mutually 

 related results. Left to act independently of each other, 

 each according to its separate commission, and each with 

 a wide lange of potentiality to be modified by associated 



