Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/105

Rh the monster of maturer years to the savage solitudes of his forest-lair, and the graceful passions of childhood naturally grow up in the man into demons of misery and blood. As life advances, the garden of nature becomes more and more a howling wilderness, and nature's passions and indulgences blacken her own shining skies: and before our course is run, life, under her guidance, has become a spectacle of greater ghastliness than death itself.

Nature prompts a purely epicurean creed, and the logic of physical science binds it down upon the understandings of men; for suppose that we should turn and fight against the force that drives us. But how can we? says the logic of physics. We are in everything at the mercy of a foreign causality, and how can we resist its sway? We are drifting before the breath of nature, and can the wave turn against the gale that is impelling it, and refuse to flow? Drift on, then, thou epicurean, thou child of nature, passive in thy theory and thy practice, and sheathed in what appears to be an irrefragable logic, and see where thy creed will land thee!

But perhaps man has been armed by nature with weapons wherewith to fight against the natural powers that are seeking to enslave him. As if nature would give man arms to be employed against herself; as if she would lift with her own hands the yoke of bondage from his neck. And even supposing that nature were thus to assist him, would she not be merely removing him from the conduct of one