CHANGE THE UNIVERSAL LAW.

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standard. If existing humanity is the gauge by which truth must be determined, then must that gauge-existing humanity-be fixed.

Now that it is not fixed, might have been thought sufficiently obvious without any proving-so obvious indeed as to make proof look ridiculous. But, unfortunately, those whose prejudices make them think otherwise, are too numerous to be passed by. Their scepticism needs to be met by facts; and, wearisome though it may be to the philosophic reader, there is no alternative but to go into these.

§ 2. And first, let us pause a moment to consider the antecedent improbability of this alleged constancy in human nature. It is a trite enough remark that change is the law of all things: true equally of a single object, and of the universe. Nature in its infinite complexity is ever growing to a new development. Each successive result becomes the parent of an additional influence, destined in some degree to modify all future results. No fresh thread enters into the texture of that endless web, woven in "the roaring loom of Time," but what more or less alters the pattern. It has been so from the beginning. As we turn over the leaves of the earth's primeval history-as we interpret the hieroglyphics in which are recorded the events of the unknown past, we find this same ever-beginning, never-ceasing change. We see it alike in the organic and the inorganic-in the decompositions and recombinations of matter, and in the constantly-varying forms of animal and vegetable life. Old formations are worn down; new ones are deposited. Forests and bogs become coal basins; and the now igneous rock was once sedimentary. With an altering atmosphere, and a decreasing temperature, land and sea perpetually bring forth fresh races of insects, plants, and animals. All things are metamorphosed; infusorial shells into chalk and flint, sand into stone, stone into gravel. Strata get contorted; seas fill up; lands are alternately upheaved and sunk. Where once rolled a fathomless ocean, now tower the snow-covered peaks of a wide-spread, richly-clothed country, teeming with existence; and where a vast continent once stretched, there remain but a few lonely coral islets to mark the graves of its submerged mountains. Thus also is it with systems, as well as with worlds. Orbits vary in their forms, axes in their inclinations, suns in their brightness. Fixed only in name, the stars are incessantly changing their relationships to each other. New ones from time to time suddenly appear, increase, and wane; whilst the members of each nebula-suns, planets, and their satellites, sweep forever onward into unexplored infinity.

Strange indeed would it be, if, in the midst of this universal mutation, man alone were constant, unchangeable. But it is not so. He also obeys the law of indefinite varia. tion. His circumstances are ever altering; and he is ever adapting himself to them. Between the naked houseless savage, and the Shakspeares and Newtons of a civilized state, lie unnumbered degrees of difference. The contrasts of races in form, colour, and feature, are not greater than the contrasts in their moral and intellectual qualities. That superiority of sight which enables a Bushman to see further with the naked eye than a European with a telescope, is fully paralleled by the European's more perfect intellectual vision. The Calmuck in delicacy of smell, and the red Indian in acuteness of hearing, do not excel the white man more than the white man excels them in moral susceptibility. Every age, every nation, every climate, exhibits a modified form of humanity; and in all times, and amongst all peoples, a greater or less amount of change is going on.

There cannot indeed be a more astounding instance of

MUTATIONS OF MANKIND.

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the tenacity with which men will cling to an opinion in spite of an overwhelming mass of adverse evidence, than is shown in this prevalent belief that human nature is uniform. One would have thought it impossible to use eyes or ears without learning that mankind vary indefinitely, in instincts, in morals, in opinions, in tastes, in rationality, in every thing. Even a stroll through the nearest museum would show that some law of modification was at work. Mark the grotesque frescos of the Egyptians, or the shadowless drawings of the Chinese. Does the contrast between these and the works of European artists indicate no difference in the perceptive powers of the races? Compare the sculptures of Athens with those of Hindostan or Mexico. Is not a greater sense of beauty implied by the one than the others? But, passing to the more significant facts supplied by historians and travellers, what are we to think on reading that the Greeks and Romans had a deity to sanction and patronize every conceivable iniquity? or when we hear of Polynesian tribes who believe that their gods feed upon the souls of the departed? Surely the characters indicated by such conceptions of Divinity differ somewhat from ours! Surely, too, we may claim some essential superiority over those Tartars who leave infirm parents to die of hunger in the desert; and over those Feejee islanders, amongst whom members of the same family have to keep watch against each other's treachery. It is not the custom of an Englishman to dine, like a Carrib, upon a roasted captive; or even as the Abyssinian, on a quivering slice from the haunch of a live ox. Neither does he, like a red Indian, delight in the writhing of a victim at the stake; nor, like a Hindoo, burn his wife that her spirit may haunt his enemy.

What one respect is there in which it can be asserted that human nature is always the same? Is it in rationality? Why, Anaxagoras had to fly his country for having

blasphemously asserted that the sun was not the chariot of the deity Helios: whilst amongst ourselves a child often puzzles its seniors by the question, Who made God? Is it in justice? No: badly as the moderns have treated slaves, they have never, like the Spartans, encouraged their young warriors to waylay and assassinate helots for practice. Is it in honesty? If so, how come we to read that "piracy was the exercise, the trade, the glory, and the virtue of the Scandinavian youth;" whilst amongst ourselves privateering, even in time of war, is disapproved? Is it in want of mercy? Not so: for much as Austrian butcheries have lately disgraced Europe, they have not paralleled the doings of Gengis Khan, who signalized his first victory by casting seventy prisoners into cauldrons of boiling water; or of Timour, who massacred 100,000 Indian prisoners, and erected a pyramid of 90,000 human heads on the smoking ruins of Bagdad; or of Attila, who totally extirpated and erased seventy cities. Is it in vindictiveness? Why no: for whilst we are told of the Begum Sumroo, that having ordered one of her dancing girls to be bricked up in a vault, she had her bed placed over it, that she might listen to her victim's dying moans; we find our own Queen requesting, much to her credit, that the man who fired at her should not be flogged. Where now is the sameness? It is not in actions as we see. Is it then in manners and opinions? Certainly not. Society in our day would hardly receive a lady or gentleman known to have poisoned an enemy: in Italy, however, there was a time when disgrace did not attach to such. No family would now follow the example of the Visconti, and choose the viper for an armorial bearing. Nor could we in the nineteenth century, find a match to that German captain of mercenaries, who in silver letters labelled himself "Duke Werner, Lord of the great Company; the enemy of mercy, of pity, and of God."

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But why go abroad for illustrations of human variability? have we not plenty at home? In those early days when it was thought "quite sufficient for noblemen to winde their horn, and carry their hawke fair, and leave study and learning to the children of mean people"-in those days when men secured themselves inside thick walls and behind deep moats, and when women wore daggers, character was not just what we now find it. Whilst all nominally held the creed professed by ourselves, the Borderer was most zealous at his prayers when going on a foray; saints' names were battle cries; bishops led on their retainers to fight; and the highest piety was in the slaying of Saracens. Must not our natures have changed somewhat, when we translate this same religion into peace, into philanthropic effort of all kinds, into missionary enterprise, into advocacy of temperance, into inquiries about "labour and the poor"? Does the agitation for the abolition of death punishment indicate no revolution in men's feelings since the days when Cromwell's body was exhumed, and his head stuck on Temple Bar-the days when criminals were drawn and quartered as well as hung -the days when there were murmurs "because Stafford was suffered to die without seeing his bowels burned before his face"-the days when creaking gibbets were scattered over the country-the days when church-doors were covered with the skins of men who had committed sacrilege? And when we read that Sir John Hawkins, in honour of his having been the first to commence the slavetrade, received the addition to his coat of arms of "a demi-moor proper bound with a cord," does it not seem that the national character has improved between his times and ours, when, out of sympathy for the negroes, 300,000 persons pledged themselves to abstain from all West-India produce?

But really it is absurd to argue the matter. The very