st he is placed as freight,
whether dead or alive it were hard to say, in the hold of the
self-steering ship, "Society." These propositions and the reasons, or
unreasons, by which they are supported, we will examine in order.

1. _Free-Will_. The question of free-will has at sundry times and
seasons, and by champions many and furious, been disputed, till the
ground about it is all beaten into blinding dust, wherein no reasonable
man can now desire to cloud his eyes and clog his lungs. It is, indeed,
one of the cheerful signs of our times, that there is a growing relish
for clear air and open skies, a growing indisposition to mingle in old
and profitless controversies. It commonly happens in such controversies,
as it undoubtedly has happened in the dispute about free-will, that both
parties have been trying to pull up Life or Spirit by the roots, and
make a show, _a la_ Barnum, of all its secrets. The enterprise was
zealously prosecuted, but would not prosper. In truth, there are strict
and jealous limits to the degree in which man's mind can become an
object to itself. By silent consciousness, by an action of reason and
imagination sympathetic with pure inward life, man may _feel_ far down
into the sweet, awful depths and mysteries of his being; and the results
of this inward intimation are given in the great poems, the great art
and divine philosophy of all time, and in the commanding beliefs of
mankind; but so soon as one begins to come to his own existence as an
outsider and stranger, and attempts to bear away its secret, so soon he
begins to be balked.

Mr. Buckle, however, has assumed in a summary and authoritative way to
settle this question of free-will; and, without entering into the dust
and suffocation of the old interminable dispute, we may follow him far
enough to see whether he has thrown any light upon the matter, or has
only thrown light upon his own powers as a thinker.

His direct polemic against the doctrine of Free-Will consists simply
of an attempt to identify it with the notion of Chance in physics. The
notion of Chance, he says, is the same with that of Free-Will; the
doctrine of Necessary Connection with the dogma of Predestination. This
statement has certainly an imposing air. But consider it. To assert the
identity of chance and free-will is but another way of saying that pure
freedom is one and the same with absolute lawlessness,--that where
freedom exists, law, order, reason do not. If this