e kachthes, all aei pote_
_ze tauta, koudeis oiden ex otou phane--_

the unwritten irresistible laws, ever-living, whose origin no one can
tell.

It would be of no avail, I submit, to point out to Sophocles, as
Spencer pointed out to Kant, that a knowledge of the early condition of
man would have made short work of these sublimities, that the cosmical
man was before the ethical man, in whom we discover very little
evidence of these majestic laws of such universal and undeniable
validity. The reply would be that the growth of them is only evidence
of what was potentially present from the first, that just as the
beating of brass was no obstacle to the ultimate evolution of the opera
or the oratorio, or the first vague feelings of wonderment with which
primitive man surveyed himself and his surroundings to the creation of
the world of science and philosophy, so the undoubted fact that man was
unmoral at the start is no obstacle to the belief that the moral law
was as existent then as now. Nay, just as the cosmic process itself
from the first contained the promise and potency of an organic form
ultimately to be called man and to become "the crowning glory of the
universe," so also, we hold, it contained the potentialities of that
whereby man was enabled to crown the splendid edifice of creation by
the imperishable deeds he has done, and that just as it would be futile
to ask one to point out traces of man amongst "the dragons of the
prime," or some Bathybiotic slime, so it would be equally irrelevant to
demand indications of moral life in the tertiary man. But, as in the
savage of to-day, as in the infant, it is there; and the fact that it
ultimately appears shows that it was there. So surely as the laws of
music, mathematics and thought, are of the Sophoclean category of
eternal facts, man's discoveries not his creations, so also are the
moral laws, and, therefore, when Mr. Spencer points out the aborigines
who are destitute, to all appearances, of what we understand by the
term morality and traces its growth through almost everlasting
generations of men, he is but describing the history of ethic, the
development of morality, just as one might write the history of music,
or of the rifle, from the days of the blunderbuss to the Mauser or
Lee-Metford; but what ethic, what morality, is _in se_, he leaves
untouched. The form differs from the content, _history_ differs from
the _reality_ of which it is the history, and