The Philosophy of Progress in Human Affairs (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 13 CHAPTER II. LAW AND LIBERTY. Mankind only seeks for that which it believes to exist and expects to find. It cannot therefore be supposed that the laws of social life will have their students and expositors, unless there is a previous faith that their presence may be traced in all the operations of which the human faculties are capable. This faith to be rational should be founded upon some previous acquaintance with the truths of physical science; and individual minds pass rapidly through the course traced in the last chapter, as that in which the collective mind of humanity moved through a long succession of ages, until it reached the latest epoch of modern civilization, characterized by its expansive benevolence, its energetic cultivation of positive science, and its conviction that the true golden age belongs to the future towards which society is hastening,and not to the past which every day renders more inaccessible and remote. The love of liberty, together with preconceptions of freewill, virtue, and responsibility, have often retarded the recognition of law, and many still fear to admit its omnipresence lest the universe should lose its godlike character, and assume the aspect of a cold, lifeless mechanism, in which man's noblest aspirations and purest affections are only like the cogs and pinions that go to make up the fabric of a mill. A more intimate acquaintance with the subject will calm these fears, and show that freedom is not less a reality because it is exercised within limits, and according to unvarying princi pies susceptible of elucidation. Humboldt defines science as " the labour of mind applied to nature," and reminds us that the external world has no real existence for us beyond the image reflected within ourselves through the medium of the sens...