28 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



very little new at a time without exhausting our 

 tempering power — and hence presently our temper. 



Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though 

 de minimis non curat lex, — though all laws fail when 

 applied to trifles, — yet too sudden a change in the 

 manner in which our ideas are associated is as cata- 

 clysmic and subversive of healthy evolution as are 

 material convulsions, or too violent revolutions in 

 politics. This must always be the case, for change 

 is essentially miraculous, and the only lawful home of 

 the mirade is in the microscopically small. Here, 

 indeed, miracles were in the beginning, are now, and 

 ever shall be, but we are deadened if they are required 

 of us on a scale which is visible to the naked eye. 

 If we are told to work them our hands fall nerveless 

 down ; if, come what may, we must do or die, we are 

 more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If we 

 are required to believe them — which only means to 

 fuse them with our other ideas — we either take the 

 law into our own hands, and our minds being in the 

 dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we 

 have fused the miracle ; or if we play more fairly and 

 insist on our minds swallowing and assimilating it, 

 we weaken our judgments, and pro tanto kill our souls. 

 If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as 

 fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves ; 

 and yet upon a small scale these same miracles are 

 the breath and essence of life ; to cease to work them 

 is to die. And by miracle I do not merely mean some- 

 thing new, strange, and not very easy of comprehension 

 — I mean something which violates every canon of 



