Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/104

94 their impressions; or else, endowing thee with certain innate capacities, she teaches thee that all thy peculiar developments are merely evolved under a necessary law out of germs that were born within thee, are but the fruits of seeds thou broughtest into the world with thee already sown. But whatever she makes of thee, thou art no more thine own master, according to her report, than the woods that burst into bud beneath an influence they cannot control, or than the sea rolling in the wind.

Such is the award of physical science with respect to man; and, confined to his birth and the earliest periods of his life, her estimate of him is true. When contemplated during the first stages of his existence, Hamlet's pipe breathed upon by another's breath, and fingered by another's touch, and giving out sounds of discord or of harmony according to the will of the blower, is not merely a type, but is the actual reality of man.

But these are remote and visionary contemplations. Turning from man in his cradle, let us observe the actual condition of our living selves.

We are all born, as we have said, both in our external and our internal fittings up, within the domain and jurisdiction of nature; and nature, to our opening life, is a paradise of sweets.

But the nascent fierceness which adds but new graces to the sportive beauty of the tiger-cub, condemns