The Law of Equivalents in Its Relation to Political and Social Ethics (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: Law of Equivalents, because their enterprise is a commendable one, can do so only upon terms of disturbing and overthrowing the very constitution of the moral universe. For this is just what an Equivalent means. This law is something established by Nature, or rather is only a statement of what Nature is. It is not a mere arbitrary rule like that which a man may establish and withdraw capriciously and at his pleasure; and instead of saying, as we do of a man who is inexorable, that he will not yield, it would be more proper to say of this law that it cannot yield. It is inexorable because it has no power of being anything else. It is part and parcel of the great general economy of the universe, which has determined unalterably the office of every element, and the relation which each element shall severally bear to every other, equivalents being fixed in the moral world with the same certainty that belongs to them in the material world. A certain degree of cold, or absence of heat, is necessary to convert water into ice. Such result can be reached in no other way, but it happens itself, if the expression is admissible, upon the conditions being supplied; nor can the wit of man prevent its happening, or by any application of force prevent its happening, according to the laws which govern the process, and so increase ita bulk. The healing art, perhaps, furnishes a more significant illustration. The practitioner has frequent occasion to administer a stimulant, in orderthat the patient's vital force shall not be exhausted before the applied remedial agents produce the desired result. He can kill the disease, if the patient will only live long enough. And this point he can manage if he can only avail himself of the power for good which the stimulant supplies, and at the same time avoid ...