THE SCOPE OF P8TCR0L0OT. 7 



more direct contact with the object of their love. Blow 

 bubbles through a tube into the bottom of a pail of water, 

 they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air. Their 

 action may again be poetically interpreted as due to a 

 longing to reccmbine with the mother-atmosphere above 

 the surface. But if you invert a jar full of water over the 

 pail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom, 

 shut in from the outer air, although a slight deflection 

 from their course at the outset, or a re-descent towards the 

 rim of the jar when they found their ujDward course im- 

 peded, would easily have set them free. 



If now we pass from such actions as these to those of 

 living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wants 

 Juliet as the filings want the magnet ; and if no obstacles 

 intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as 

 they. But Komeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between 

 them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against 

 its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the 

 card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the 

 wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With 

 the filings the path is fixed; wdiether it reaches the end 

 depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which 

 is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely. 



Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placed 

 our bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of water. 

 The waul jf breath M'ill soon make him also long to rejoin 

 the mother-atmosphere, and he will take the shortest path 

 to his end by swimming straight upwards. But if a jar 

 full of water be inverted over him, he will not, like the 

 bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyielding 

 roof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood until 

 by re-descending again he has discovered a path round its 

 brim to the goal of his desires. Again the fixed end, the 

 varying means ! 



Such contrasts between living and inanimate perform- 

 ances end by leading men to deny that in the j)liysical 

 world final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires are. 

 to-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air. 

 No one sujjposes now that the end of any activity which 

 they may display is an ideal purpose joresiding over the 



