Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though de minimis non curat lex,—­though all the laws fail when applied to trifles,—­yet too sudden a change in the manner in which our ideas are associated is as cataclysmic and subversive of healthy evolution as are material convulsions, or too violent revolutions in politics.  This must always be the case, for change is essentially miraculous, and the only lawful home of the miracle is in the microscopically small.  Here, indeed, miracles were in the beginning, are now, and ever shall be, but we are deadened if they are required of us on a scale which is visible to the naked eye.  If we are told to work them our hands fall nerveless down; if, come what may, we must do or die, we are more likely to die than to succeed in doing.  If we are required to believe them—­which only means to fuse them with our other ideas--we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds being in the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and pro tanto kill our souls.  If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a small scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to cease to work them is to die.  And by miracle I do not merely mean something new, strange, and not very easy of comprehension—­I mean something which violates every canon of thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed to respect; something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing.  This, which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as life and death.

Claude Bernard says, Rien ne nait, rien ne se cree, tout se continue.  La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune creation, elle est d’une eternelle continuation; {35a} but surely he is insisting upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another which is just as real, and just as important; he might have said, Rien ne se continue, tout nait, tout se cree.  La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune continuation.  Elle est d’une eternelle creation; for change is no less patent a fact than continuity, and, indeed, the two stand or fall together.  True, discontinuity, where development is normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only the difference between looking at distances on a small instead of a large map; we cannot have even the smallest change without a small partial corresponding discontinuity; on a small scale—­too small, indeed, for us to cognise—­these breaks in continuity, each one of which must, so far as our understanding