ena which Kant said struck him dumb--the starry heavens, and
right and wrong--are vainly to be reduced to the same order of things.
Nothing can be stranger than the contrast between the rigid, inevitable
sequences of nature, apparently so elastic only because not yet
perfectly comprehended, and the consciousness of man in the midst of
it. Nothing can be stranger than the juxtaposition of physical law and
man's sense of responsibility and choice. Man is an "insertion," an
"interpolation in the physical system"; he is "insulated as an anomaly
in the midst of matter and material law." Mr. Mozley's words are
striking:--

The first appearance, then, of man in nature was the appearance of
a new being in nature; and this fact was relatively to the then
order of things miraculous; no more physical account can be given
of it than could be given of a resurrection to life now. What more
entirely new and eccentric fact, indeed, can be imagined than a
human soul first rising up amidst an animal and vegetable world?
Mere consciousness--was not that of itself a new world within the
old one? Mere knowledge--that nature herself became known to a
being within herself, was not that the same? Certainly man was not
all at once the skilled interpreter of nature, and yet there is
some interpretation of nature to which man as such is equal in
some degree. He derives an impression from the sight of nature
which an animal does not derive; for though the material spectacle
is imprinted on its retina, as it is on man's, it does not see
what man sees. The sun rose, then, and the sun descended, the
stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven,
the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages
before a single being existed who _saw_ it. The counterpart of
this whole scene was wanting--the understanding mind; that mirror
in which the whole was to be reflected; and when this arose it was
a new birth for creation itself, that it became _known_,--an image
in the mind of a conscious being. But even consciousness and
knowledge were a less strange and miraculous introduction into the
world than conscience.

Thus wholly mysterious in his entrance into this scene, man is
_now_ an insulation in it; he came in by no physical law, and his
freewill is in utter contrast to that law. What can be more
incomprehensible,