Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/103

Rh amid her teeming floods. She shapes his passions and desires, and he, disputing not her guardianship, puts his neck beneath their yoke. All that he is, he is without his own co-operation: his reason and his appetites come to him from her hand, he accepts them unconsciously, and goes forth in quest of his gratifications in blind obedience to the force that drives him. All the germs that nature has planted in his breast owe their growth to her breath, and, unfolding themselves beneath it, they flourish in blessedness—for a time.

Hence this view of human life being the first to present itself to observation, the genius of physical science has ever been foremost to attempt to fix the position of man in the scale of the universe, and to read to him his doom. She tells thee, O man! that thou art but an animal of a higher and more intelligent class; a mere link, though perhaps a bright one, in the uninterrupted chain of creation. No clog art thou, she says, in the revolutions of the blind and mighty wheel. She lays her hand upon thee, and thou, falling into her ranks, goest to swell the legions of dependent things, the leader, it may be, but not the antagonist of nature. She bends thee down under the law of causality, and, standing in her muster-roll, thou art forced to acknowledge that law as the sovereign of thy soul. The stars obey it in their whirling courses, why shouldst not thou? She either makes thee a mere tabula rasa, to be written upon by the pens of external things—an educt of