REST AND MOTION.

Motion and Rest are the two feet upon which existence goes.  All action and all definite power result from the intimacy and consent of these opposite principles.  If, therefore, one would construct any serviceable mechanism, he must incorporate into it, and commonly in a manifold way, a somewhat passive, a somewhat contrary, and, as it were, inimical to action, though action be the sole aim and use of his contrivance.  Thus, the human body is penetrated by the passive and powerless skeleton, which is a mere weight upon the muscles, a part of the burden that, nevertheless, it enables them to bear.  The lever of Archimedes would push the planet aside, provided only it were supplied with its indispensable complement, a fulcrum, or fixity:  without this it will not push a pin.  The block of the pulley must have its permanent attachment; the wheel of the locomotive engine requires beneath it the fixed rail; the foot of the pedestrian, solid earth; the wing of the bird rests upon the relatively stable air to support his body, and upon his body to gain power over the air.  Nor is it alone of operations mechanical that the law holds good:  it is universal; and its application to pure mental action may be shown without difficulty.  A single act of the mind is represented by the formation of a simple sentence.  The process consists, first, in the mind’s fixing upon and resting in an object, which thereby becomes the subject of the sentence; and, secondly, in predication, which is movement, represented by the verb.  The reader will easily supply himself with instances and illustrations of this, and need not, therefore, be detained.

In the economy of animal and vegetable existence, as in all that Nature makes, we observe the same inevitable association.  Here is perpetual fixity of form, perpetual flux of constituent,—­the ideas of Nature never changing, the material realization of them never ceasing to change.  A horse is a horse through all the ages; yet the horse of to-day is changed from the horse of yesterday.

If one of these principles seem to get the start, and to separate itself, the other quickly follows.  No sooner, for example, does any person perform an initial deed, proceeding purely (let us suppose) from free will, than Nature in him begins to repose therein, and consequently inclines to its repetition for the mere reason that it has been once done.  This is Habit, which makes action passive, and is the greatest of labor-saving inventions.  Custom is the habit of society, holding the same relation to progressive genius.  It is the sleeping partner in the great social firm; it is thought and force laid up and become fixed capital.  Annihilate this,—­as in the French Revolution was attempted,—­and society is at once reduced to its bare immediate force, and must scratch the soil with its fingers.