Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/106

96 blind and faithless guide, to place him under that of another equally blind, and probably equally faithless? Having been misled in so many instances in obeying nature, we may well be suspicious of all her dictates.

We have also been prated to about a moral sense born within us, and this, too, by physical science—by the science that founds its whole procedure upon the law of causality, as if this law did not obliterate the very life of duty, and render it an unmeaning word. This moral sense, it is said, impels us to virtue, if its sanctions be listened to, or lets us run to crime if they be disregarded. But what impels us to listen to the voice of this monitor, or to turn away from it with a deaf ear? Still, according to physical science, it can be nothing but the force of a natural and foreign causality. Nowhere, O man! throughout the whole range of thy moral and intellectual being can physical science allow thee a single point whereon to rest the lever of thy own free co-operation. The moral power which she allows thee is at the same time a natural endowment; and being so, must of course, like other natural growths, wax or wane under laws immutable and independent of thy control. Thou art still, then, a dependent thing, entirely at the mercy of foreign causes, and having no security against any power that may make thee its instrument.

What, then, is to be done? This: Let us spurn from us the creed of nature, together with the fatalistic logic by which it is upheld. If we admit the