Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/329

Rh This, no doubt, is one of the mills of the gods, but whether it grinds for us or against us depends upon ourselves. And passing from the purely physical to vital phenomena, the laws are no less imperative and the consequences no less certain, if not so immediately disastrous, in case of a departure from normal relations. There is no moment of man's existence when he is not subject to the law of causation, but this may not imply the kind of fatality that discouraged Professor Youmans.

Granting the Spencerian view, that he is an organized aggregate of consequences, the result of natural selection operating through all preceding environments, and thus an heir of all the past, still he has risen from the beast and become what he is, a volitional, intellectual, social, moral being, whose acquired faculties are not useless but are assisting factors in continuous development.

And granting that the exercise of them is within the domain of law and a resultant, everything is in motion; the world is full of promptings to congruous action by rational beings. The fall of rain or snow is a sufficient inducement to seek shelter or the falling tree to stand from under. The life within and without, the consequences of individual and collective actions, the experiences of pleasure and pain, furnish abundant incentives to orderly conduct. Hut man misperceives, misunderstands, and misadventures; all men more or less; some so wayward and eccentric as to encroach upon the rights of others, and therefore requiring restraint. Hence the need of government and the resulting questions, of what kind shall it be, how much, how administered, and where applied?

And although history and evolution are incompetent to answer the whole of them, there are partial answers in both. History can say positively, not the "eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth" principle; not the vendetta, not