lly comprehended, then it is
possible to anticipate the results of that particular combination with
absolute certainty. Other causes may interfere, and modify these
results--may accelerate of postpone them, or entirely absorb and conceal
them in the general issue of complicated affairs. Yet the particular
results themselves are not, and cannot be defeated or annulled. They are
merely transformed by a sort of 'composition and resolution' of social
and political causes, exactly similar to that which takes place in
mechanics, when two or more forces not concurrent in direction, impel a
body in a line altogether different from that in which either of the
forces may have acted. Every physical impulse, it is said, which is
initiated anywhere on the earth, is felt to the extremities of our solar
system--every motion of the smallest particle of matter communicating
its effect, however inappreciable, to the most distant planet, and as
far beyond as the power of gravitation may extend. It is precisely so
with all social events, even those of the most insignificant character.
Every one of them has its appropriate influence, which is
indestructible; and they all combine to make up the great whole of human
action, the results of which at any specific period are only the
necessary and inevitable consequences of all antecedent facts.

It was the opinion of that most accomplished political philosopher,
Burke, that 'politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings, but
to human nature, of which reason is but a part, and by no means the
greatest part,'--the meaning of which is, simply, that the reasonings do
not comprehend, as premises, all the complicated facts which enter into
any important political problem, and hence the conclusion in such cases
cannot be absolutely certain, and ought not to be implicitly received.
It would be extremely difficult to explain how politics could be
adjusted to human nature without the exercise of reason, which alone can
regulate the process of adjustment. But we may certainly claim that, in
the lapse of nearly a century since Burke wrote, the reason has been
considerably enlightened, and something more has been learned of human
nature itself, its apparently capricious and irregular phenomena having
been ascertained to be the subjects of systematic order, as complete as
that which prevails in all other departments of nature. The laws of
social existence and development have been to some extent discov