Men will not starve, if they can help it, nor thirst, if water can be gathered in the palm or reached by digging.  If they succeed in making a cup, they betray a tendency to ornament its rim or stem, or to emboss a story on its side.  They are not disposed to become food for animals, or to remain unprotected from the climate.  They like to have the opportunity of supplying their own wants and luxuries, and will resist any tyrannical interference with the methods they prefer.  They propagate their race, and collect in communities for defence and social advantage.  When thus collected, they will learn to talk, to write, to symbolize, to construct something, be it a medicine-lodge or a Parthenon.  Their primitive sense of an invisible and spiritual agency assumes the forms of their ignorance and of their disposition:  dread and cruelty, awe and size, fancy and proportion, gentleness and simplicity, will be found together in the rites and constructions of religion.  They like to make the whole tribe or generation conform; and it is dangerous to oppose this tendency to preserve the shape of society from within and to protect it against assaults from without.  These are motives originally independent of circumstances, and which made the first circumstances by coming in contact with the elements of the physical world.

But these circumstances are not always and everywhere as invariable as the primitive wants which first set them in motion.  Enlargement of knowledge, of political and human relations, of the tenure of the earth, increases the number and variety of circumstances, and combines them so unexpectedly that it is a science to discover their laws, and the conditions of action and reaction between men and things that happen.  We can depend upon Human Nature, but the problem always remains, What shall be expected of Human Nature under this or that modification of its external environment?  Great laws from without act as well as great laws from within.  If we knew all the laws, we should know what average consequences to expect.  But in the mean time we shall commit the error of supposing that History does nothing but repeat itself, fretfully crooning into the “dull ear” of age a twice-told tale, if we do not allow for the modifications amid which the primitive impulses find themselves at work.

And besides, there is a difference in individuals; one set of people alone is too poor to furnish us with an idea of human nature.  It is natural for Themistocles, Pausanias, or Benedict Arnold, under suspicion or ill-treatment, to desert to the enemy, and propose crushing his country for a balm to apply to wounded feelings.  But General Fremont, in similar circumstances, will derive comfort from his loyal heart, and wait in hopes that at least a musket may be put into his hands with which to trust him against the foe.  These are very simple variations; they turn upon the proportion of selfish feeling which the men possess.  A self-seeking man will turn