scope? Latent in that lump of flesh there may be, for aught we know, a sage or a fool, a villain or a saint. If circumstance makes the man, the circumstances into which he is born, or those which await his after years, have predetermined or will inevitably determine him this or that among the wide varieties of character which life presents. Know the circumstances, and your horoscope is infallible; given the accidents, you have the man.

But on this supposition there is no man; human nature disappears; the individual is only a topic of fortune, an arena for the play of chance. Reason revolts from such a conclusion. Closer examination will discern behind the accidents a substance, a substantial being whom they befall; will find that man is what he is by reason of something in him, and not altogether through what happens to him; that in fact the idea in each subject is the more decisive factor in his destiny.

Let us trace the operation of this interior motive.

And first, as regards mankind at large, mark the force of ideas as shown in the phenomena of race. Observe how differently human nature develops itself in the Aryan, the Negro, the Malay. All these partake of one humanity. The essential attributes of man are common to all. Why is it that only one of these races has made constant,

enduring progress in civilization, while the rest, after reaching a certain stage of development, have remained stationary or declined? Why is it that the highest culture has been attained by multitudes of the one, and by only here and there an exceptional individual in the others? Why has not the negro attained the same eminence and made equal progress in science and the arts with the European? Circumstances against him? Because of slavery? How came he to be enslaved? It was not in him, and is not in him, to develop a commanding civilization of his own.

Why is it that the red men who inhabited this continent for unknown ages before the European took possession of it have left such slight traces of their existence on the soil? The country was a wilderness then, and would have remained a wilderness still, in aboriginal hands. See what a different aspect it presents since the Saxons have had possession of it. Here are the same rivers and harbors, the same lakes and mountains, which the Indian knew and named. See what has been made of them by a different race! These rivers which once rolled idly to the main have been made to drive the wheel of industry, and to bear the products of the distant inland to the coast. These harbors are converted into floating forests, these lakes are made highways of traffic, these mountains have

been forced to render up the secret riches of their trust. Here the circumstances are the same, but a different idea supervenes. To the red man they were barren; given in marriage to European ideas they become prolific of endless use.

The preponderance of idea over accident in human life is seen in the propagation from age to age of those physical and moral features which characterize a particular nation or tribe, as in the case of the gypsies, the immortal tramps, of the Jews of the Dispersion, who have propagated through two millenniums an inextinguishable type.

It is seen in the persistence from generation to generation of family traits, the Habsburg, the Bourbon, the Stuart.

In individuals the predominant idea is not so conspicuous, is not always apparent, for the reason that individuals are known to us only as manifested within the limits of a single life-history. In individuals it is not easy to distinguish between the phenomenal and the real, between the historic. manifestation and the fundamental type. Yet we often hear it said of this or that individual that Nature intended him to be something different from what he has come to be. It is certain that Nature never designed Coelestine V. to be pope, nor Henry VI. of England to be king. Heine says. of Robespierre and Immanuel Kant that Nature

designed them to be shopkeepers, to weigh coffee and sugar; but Fate decreed that they should weigh something else: that the one should place a King, and the other a God, in his scales.

Nevertheless, something of the original character, the true idea of the man, will show itself beneath the accidents of his lot. Cromwell would not have been Lord Protector of England but for the maladministration of Charles I. His character as history presents it would have been different, or rather history would not have presented it at all, had he never left,

"His private garden, where

He lived, reservèd and austere,
As if his highest plot.

To plant the bergamot."

But, on the other hand, only a character such as Cromwell's was in its native quality, could have filled that place. Napoleon Bonaparte would never have been the prodigy he was, but for the French Revolution, and might have led an unnotorious life; but Bonaparte under any circumstances would have been an organizing and commanding power.

The "prohibitionist" pleads that the dram-shop is the cause of nine tenths of the crimes which desolate society. The plea may be valid in civic philosophy, but a searching psychology puts a different interpretation on the facts. The dram-shop is no

doubt the occasion of a vast amount of criminal acts. The dram-shop develops the sot, but does not make him. The man who under any conditions could become a sot and, under the stimulus of intoxication, commit murder, must have had something in the original make of him, some pre-natal element of weakness or wickedness, which predisposed him to be the victim of temptation. The overt act, the sinful growth, may be the result of accident; the essential nature never. The character which the world sees and judges, rewards or punishes, may be very different from the real typical character, the underlying nature, which the world knows not, which, it may be, the individual himself knows not, but which carries the secret of his final destiny.

Conceding to external conditions all that can fairly be claimed for them, there is yet in the bosom of every man a force which transcends them. all. No power which is brought to bear upon him from without can finally countervail the original intent of the unfathomable soul. The difference between characters which we call original and those which we deem common-place is perhaps but a difference of more or less activity of temperament. In the one case the originality finds expression, in the other it is latent. But, at bottom, every man is original; there is more of our own