“A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces that have been brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards.  His action at any moment depends solely upon his constitution, and on the intensity and direction of the various agencies to which he is, and has been, subjected.  Some of these will counteract each other; but as he is by nature, and as he has been acted on, and is now acted on from without, so will he do, as certainly and regularly as though he were a machine.

“We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him.  We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man’s character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.

“For the future depends upon the present, and the present (whose existence is only one of those minor compromises of which human life is full—­for it lives only on sufferance of the past and future) depends upon the past, and the past is unalterable.  The only reason why we cannot see the future as plainly as the past, is because we know too little of the actual past and actual present; these things are too great for us, otherwise the future, in its minutest details, would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose our sense of time present by reason of the clearness with which we should see the past and future; perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is foreign.  What we do know is, that the more the past and present are known, the more the future can be predicted; and that no one dreams of doubting the fixity of the future in cases where he is fully cognisant of both past and present, and has had experience of the consequences that followed from such a past and such a present on previous occasions.  He perfectly well knows what will happen, and will stake his whole fortune thereon.

“And this is a great blessing; for it is the foundation on which morality and science are built.  The assurance that the future is no arbitrary and changeable thing, but that like futures will invariably follow like presents, is the groundwork on which we lay all our plans—­the faith on which we do every conscious action of our lives.  If this were not so we should be without a guide; we should have no confidence in acting, and hence we should never act, for there would be no knowing that the results which will follow now will be the same as those which followed before.