comes forward to meet us, is a human being, although even that is not always so easy as it appears; for there is a gradation, an ascending scale, in which every kind of earthly creature is preceded by a lower one, and followed by a higher one, beginning from stones and metals, and ending in that most perfect of all creatures, man. The transitions from one class to another are in no way abrupt; and there are species of corals, for instance, which render it difficult for the observer to decide whether he sees a stone, a plant, or an animal. Man is separated from his fellow-creatures in a more perceptible manner than all others, in the same manner as he is endowed with greater prerogatives than the rest of the creation. Nevertheless, there exist human beings, persecuted by men, who render it difficult to acknowledge them as human beings at all; for there is a gradation downwards, from the soundness of a perfect human individual, through the manifold disorders of mind and body, through imbecility and cretinism; and, lower still, down to creatures whose vital energy shows itself in no other thing but in the process of alimentation and digestion, and even that in an imperfect degree. In one of the infirmaries of Paris, at Bicètre I think, there is a strictly and systematically arranged museum of such unfortunate creatures, ascending from the lowest degree of imbecility upwards to those who are almost healthy. It is apparent that for us who, in this disquisition, move within the regions of morality and immorality, many of these creatures cannot be regarded as beings to whom the rules of morality may be applied; and it was therefore not needless to show that the question, "What is a man?" is not to be called a useless subtlety. But, independently of those medical and physiological difficulties attached to a correct definition of mankind, we may learn from the widely-differing sentences of the philosophers of different ages that it is not easy to give such a definition. Let us try to solve this riddle without puzzling ourselves by the contradictory sentences of others.

Inasmuch as earthly things are discussed, we are perfectly entitled to regard this planet of ours as a whole, viz., as an entire Being composed of organs, of which every one has a function of its own, serviceable to the existence of the Entire. From this point of view we must be aware that the different classes of creatures perform their tasks in several different modes. The simplest beings, the stones and metals, seem, by their very weight and gravitation, to fulfil their destination either in solitary repose or by a massy assemblage, without a distinct form or movement. They want no second being for their existence, and they undergo no change till after hundreds or thousands of years by the decomposing power of the elements, and not till then they enter into affinity and cohesion with organic productions. One step higher in the above-mentioned scale we meet the crystals geometrically formed, and gradually we arrive at the region of plants, passing through the intermediate ambiguous organisations between the mineral and the plant. Among the plants we perceive that the greatest number grow single, so that every individual plant produces from and by itself flowers, fruits, and new individuals of the same kind. But we also know a great number of plants which can be propagated only by two-the female blossom being fructified by a male one. This existence in pairs is the rule in the world of animals, and no animal isolated from all other individuals of his species can develop all his innate forces and faculties. Many live together in swarms, herds, and shoals; partly in multitudes assembled to no evident purpose-for instance, the ephemerides and gnats; partly in crowds, united for the performance of some common task, as bees, ants, beavers, and many others. This work of theirs will be completed within the space of some seasons, and every new generation recommences the same work. The bees of Homer gathered the same honey and built the same cells as now-a-days.

But of all earthly creatures there is none that fulfils its destination in greater or closer association than men.

The task they have to perform cannot be accomplished, either by one single man or by an association of single men, nor even by one or several human generations; but humanity in general-that is, the totality of all men who lived, and who live now, and who are to live afterwards-has the vocation to build up that one vast and everlasting edifice whose foundation was laid by Adam, the first of men, and whose completion even the last of all men shall not live to see, because its dimensions are as endless as eternity. This community of labour is so immediately and so deeply founded in human nature from its beginning, that an isolated, and at the same time perfect, man cannot be conceived. We should certainly proclaim that man alone to be a perfect man, whose corporeal and mental faculties were all developed and worked out to the utmost of their perfectibility; but this is a claim almost contradictory to the nature of the single individual, for, if we suppose a man totally and perfectly isolated from all other individuals of his species, such a man could not even be a rational being, but at the utmost could be proclaimed to be a being endowed with the possibility of attaining rationality. A rational being must necessarily be able to have thoughts. Thoughts cannot be formed. without a language; for without words it is not only impossible to utter thoughts and to communicate them, but even to think at all. Feelings only and sensations may be had and uttered without articulated words-such feelings and sensations as we may attribute to unthinking animals. But for thoughts the word is quite the same as the body is for the soul; and the human mind is quite as unable to have thoughts or to utter them without words, as the soul of an individual can manifest itself through words and actions without a corporeal body. Now, words and language cannot exist without the preexistence of a manifold conversation and co-operation of different men; and one isolated rational man, therefore, without any previous communication with other men, is the product of a

mere abstraction, contradictory to human nature and to the results of experience.

If, therefore, man requires contact with other individuals of his species in order to become a rational being, and not only such a being as is endowed with the possibility of acquiring reason, how much more does he require such a contact if his other talents and faculties shall be developed to perfection! If, for instance, a man has talents for some art or handicraft, he not only requires a teacher to instruct him-because, without such instruction, he will never come farther than to coarse experiments and unskilful results-but he requires further the help of all those trades and professions which prepare the materials to which he is to give an artistical shape. History, which, in its endless variety, offers us examples for all and everything, has preserved for us accounts of unhappy little children who, by some accident, have been separated in their infancy from the company of all other men, and who, notwithstanding, have been preserved by a coincidence of favourable circumstances. They were discovered in a state of perfect degeneration, more resembling beasts than human beings, climbing upon trees in the wood, and unable to utter articulate sounds, nay, inaccessible to all efforts for taming and educating them. If, on the other hand, we look at Robinson Crusoe, who, on his deserted island, creates and rules a little state, being at once the only master and subject of it in his own person, that does not contradict our proposition, for Robinson Crusoe had carried with him to his island the results of European civilization—that is, intrinsically, the assistance of millions of men by whose efforts and co-operation alone civilization can be realized. An isolated human individual as such, apart from all other human beings, can only be a fit subject for the physiologist or the anatomist. The metaphysician may contemplate one single man only in such a manner as the natural philosopher contemplates a single bee. This little insect, as an individual, would be perfectly unintel

ligible to him, for all its qualities and faculties and the whole structure of his little body are such as that in beehives alone they can be developed and made use of. No single bee alone is able to build a cell, or to gather wax and honey; it wounds beasts and men, and rushes with its sting on the defenceless drone. Such an isolated bee is an unemployed, cruel, bloodthirsty little thing; whereas, on the contrary, the republic of a beehive, with its constitutional queen, shows us a community representing all that is order, industry, and conviviality; but, to learn this, we must not dwell upon the contemplation of the individual, but we must rise up to the survey of the whole; otherwise, we never shall understand in how much the individual forms an organical part of the entire. We are in general not accustomed to look at mankind as at one great and organized whole, and to conceive that all human individuals are blended together into such a whole, not only in an abstract and metaphysical sense, but in a very material and almost physiological sense. It may, therefore, be expedient to look a little nearer at this proposition.

It has often been repeated that man is of a social disposition; but we are used to understand this statement as if he were endowed with such friendly and good-natured dispositions as lead him to seek for the society of others, and to be useful to his fellow men, and not to continue single and anchoretical; and this propensity is mentioned as something worthy of praise and acknowledg ment. But we must repeat it with all possible emphasis, that this sociality of man is by no means something voluntary or spontaneous, but that an irresistible necessity compels us to be social; and that, therefore, such a sociality is neither a subject of praise nor of vituperation, but must be understood as an innate and integral part and parcel of humanity itself. By what means it has been effected that men should be so inseparably connected one with all others, and what kind of instinct has compelled them from the beginning to live in families, in communities, and in

states that is a mystery which our Almighty Creator has reserved for Himself to know, as well as He alone knows what instigation compels the bees to help one another when they build their cells. This mystery is alluded to in more than one tradition of ancient mythology. Some of my readers will know what Plato relates in his "Symposium" about the giants who undertook to take Olympus by storm. In the beginning, so the story goes, men were not framed as they are now-a-days, but the first created of them were

almost of a cylindrical form. On a round body they carried four arms and four legs, and a double head crowned the whole. These creatures were strong and mighty; like huge cylinders they rolled on their eight limbs, and their strength and fierceness were such, that the gods and goddesses began to think themselves no longer secure on their Olympus. Therefore, Jove, to master them, was obliged to cut in two every one of those monsters, so that each half had only one head and two legs and arms. From that time they were weaker, and no more to be feared by the gods; but the separated halves were possessed with an unquenchable desire of reuniting themselves with their other halves, and, whenever two such met who had formerly been united, they rushed together again in a mutual embrace. Far bolder interpretations of such ancient legends have been undertaken than that which I now propose, viz. that it alludes to the mystic unity of mankind; but, if we would make such a myth correspond to the notion given by us in the preceding lines, we would remodel it almost in the following manner. In the beginning, earth had produced only one single rational being, which was master and king of all nature, animate and inanimate. This being had millions of heads, and many millions of arms and legs, and every one of these heads invented some other art or science, and the arms executed what had been invented by the heads, and the limbs had divided the whole of the work, so that some tilled the ground and pro

duced the aliments, and others worked out the raw produce, and others besides transferred mountains and piled up stones to roof over and to shelter the giant body, and there was no power able to resist him in the execution of his projects. This many-limbed Briareus, Lord of the Earth, must, of course, prove a very self-sufficient being. Since he could fulfil all his desires and satisfy all his passions without any help, he never thought of God, but perhaps took himself for the Sovereign Master of the World. In order to humble him and to make him conscious of his dependent state, God dashed him to pieces, and dissevered his huge body into an infinite number of separate beings, scattering them over the surface of the earth. These new inhabitants of the soil had lost their unity of action, their volition being no more directed by that common head which had ruled the movements of the former body. So they erred severally at random, without aim and direction; but they were stirred by a vague remembrance of, and yearning for, their former state, which forced them to help each other consciously and unconsciously, and to minister to each other, so that they might lord it over the earth with a variety of government, though they were single and isolated.

Thus we have symbolized our notion of the organic unity of mankind, because we are anxious to impress our readers with this idea as forcibly as possible. For it is difficult for us to consider ourselves as children, the begotten of this our earth, because we move freely upon it, and are not rooted in its depths as the plants are; yet, though we can wander on the surface of the earth, we are unable to sever the soles of our feet from the ground, and, if we try to elevate ourselves never so little above the surface, we are soon reminded by gravitation of our connexion with our mother earth. But, though our organic union with the earth is in every moment proved by gravitation, no such manifest force of nature exists to make us feel that organic union with our fellow-men which we endeavoured to illustrate.

How hard is it for us to be ever aware of this, our close connexion with all other men-so close, that the very existence of every one of us is rooted in the existence of all others, and that none of us could be even so much as a man without the others! Rather than think ourselves connected with and dependent upon every other man, we like to consider ourselves free and independent, owing to our innate and permanent notion of personal freedom. But, in spite of this freedom of our will, it appears that the varied occupations of mankind are, by disposal of a higher order, so distributed among the individuals that no one can be quite idle and unemployed upon earth. The English are proud of their discovery of the division of labour; but nature had made such a discovery long before them, for there is no division of labour more perfect than that which we may observe in mankind in general. As often as things are to be produced for the use of all, and such as we require for our daily existence, there are millions of men ready to produce such necessary articles; and if, on the other hand, the achievement of such works is required as are to be done only once in a century, or a longer space of time, because the enjoyment and the understanding thereof is sufficient to occupy the human race for a long period, in such a case there appear on earth, at long intervals, some happily-gifted heroes of art and science, or of war and politics, to perform those imposing tasks, shedding their light through vast periods of history. Nay, if we look more accurately into the matter, we are entitled to say that not two men on earth are doing quite the same thing. The furrow drawn into the soil by one labourer is almost as different from that drawn by another, as the handwriting of one man is distinguishable from other handwritings; and a well-skilled farmer will mark the difference, quite in the same manner as the writing-master is able to tell whether or not two letters are written

by the same person. And a thousand

times more varied than those furrows

and characters are the thoughts and sensations of men; and the different mental faculties must show their influence upon the deeds and actions of individuals, so that not two human actions can be quite equal to each other, in the same manner as not two leaves of a tree can be found perfectly alike. It may, perhaps, be difficult, in the daily and trivial occurrences of life, to show that even there the individuals do not act as mere indifferent unities among other unities of the same species, but that every one of them is a particular and essential organical part of mankind, and that what he does cannot be done in the same way by any other man living.

In those things which appear to us more important because we are not on that sublime height from which all things, great and small, would appear to us of equal magnitude, it is easier to explain how entirely each individual nature has a character of its own, and is necessary in its own place.

It will not be disputed that such productions cannot be brought forth by proxy, and that if Schiller had not written his Wallenstein, or Shakespeare his Hamlet, no other man on earth would have composed these poems with the same words, or the same disposition of action. Now, an eminent poetical production operates on the thoughts and sentiments of the hearers and readers, and not seldom awakes in their minds resolutions fraught with influence on their future way of thinking and acting. All such consequences would not have taken place if the poetical or rhetorical work in question had not been brought to light; and so the mental disposition and the improvement of thousands would have undergone an alteration, had not this one individual poet or artist presented us with his work. In the same manner, though on a smaller scale, every one of us is working and operating within his narrow compass, coming in contact with the spheres of others, and altering their course. Those mutual influences may be compared to what the

astronomers call perturbations of the course of planets, every one of which influences and alters at every moment the course of all other planets, and is influenced reciprocally by them. We call these perturbations, not because the real course of the planet is perturbed, or brought into disorder, but because an alteration is perceived in that course in which the astronomer would prefer to see the planet going, because then his calculations might follow the star with less difficulty. In this manner the course of every man's life disturbs the career of all others, and though, perhaps, in most cases, these perturbations are so small and imperceptible that they escape our human observation, yet they undoubtedly exist, and the good done by one of us benefits whole generations, as surely as the evil done by one proves an evil for all others. It is interesting to attend to this division of labour among men in those spheres in which it may more easily be observed. So in the looms of art and science, the thread broken long since is newly tied and woven into warp and woof after the lapse of many centuries, when it is least" expected. A small manual of mathematics, now intelligible for a fifth form boy, is the joint result of the investigations of Euclid, Archimedes, Newton, Lagendre, and Gauss; and a boy's hand may pluck the noblest fruits of the genius of the loftiest minds. Thus each one works into the hands of the other, and so we perceive the unity of all who seem to wander in separate walks, every one by himself, apparently unmindful of the others, whereas truly all of them are as many branches of the great tree of humanity, springing from the same root, from the hidden depths of eternity. So floats the blossom of that poetical waterflower, seemingly unconnected and free on the liquid level, and floating meets her sisterblossom, and nobody but an experienced botanist knows that they are rooted closely side by side in the bottom of the lake.