d
responsible being, he has been feigned, like them, to possess another
immaterial principle, the vital agent, which, in a way of its own,
carries forward all the various operations in his economy.

[Sidenote: Especially to man.]

But when it was discovered that the heart of man is constructed upon the
recognised rules of hydraulics, and with its great tubes is furnished
with common mechanical contrivances, valves; when it was discovered that
the eye has been arranged on the most refined principles of optics, its
cornea, and humours, and lens properly converging the rays to form an
image--its iris, like the diaphragm of a telescope or microscope,
shutting out stray light, and also regulating the quantity admitted;
when it was discovered that the ear is furnished with the means of
dealing with the three characteristics of sound--its tympanum for
intensity, its cochlea for pitch, its semicircular canals for quality;
when it was seen that the air brought into the great air-passages by the
descent of the diaphragm, calling into play atmospheric pressure, is
conveyed upon physical principles into the ultimate cells of the lungs,
and thence into the blood, producing chemical changes throughout the
system, disengaging heat, and permitting all the functions of organic
life to go on; when these facts and very many others of a like kind were
brought into prominence by modern physiology, it obviously became
necessary to admit that animated beings do not constitute the exception
once supposed, and that organic operations are the result of physical
agencies.

If thus, in the recesses of the individual economy, these natural agents
bear sway, must they not operate in the social economy too?

[Sidenote: In social as well as individual life.]

Has the great shadeless desert nothing to do with the habits of the
nomade tribes who pitch their tents upon it--the fertile plain no
connection with flocks and pastoral life--the mountain fastnesses with
the courage that has so often defended them--the sea with habits of
adventure? Indeed, do not all our expectations of the stability of
social institutions rest upon our belief in the stability of surrounding
physical conditions? From the time of Bodin, who nearly three hundred
years ago published his work 'De Republica,' these principles have been
well recognized: that the laws of Nature cannot be subordinated to the
will of Man, and that government must be adapted to climate. It was
these