To trace effects to their causes, is the object of all science; and by
this object, as it is accomplished or incomplete, the progress of any
particular science must be determined. The order of the moral is in
reality as immutable as the laws of the physical world; and human
actions are linked to their consequences by a necessity as inexorable as
that which controls the growth of plants or the motion of the earth,
though the connexion between cause and effect is not equally
discernible. The depression of the nobles and the rise of the commons in
England, after the statutes of alienation, were the result of causes as
infallible in their operation as those which regulate the seasons and
the tides. Repeated experiments have proved beyond dispute, that gold is
heavier than iron. Is the superior value of gold to iron a fact more
questionable? Yet is value a quality purely moral, and absolutely
dependent on the will of man. The events of to-day are bound to those of
yesterday, and those of to-morrow will be bound to those of to-day, no
less certainly than the harvest of the present year springs from the
grain which is the produce of former harvests. When by a severe and
diligent analysis we have ascertained all the ingredients of any
phenomenon, and have separated it from all that is foreign and
adventitious, we know its true nature, and may deduce a general law from
our experiment; for a general law is nothing more than an expression of
the effect produced by the same cause operating under the same
circumstances. In the reign of Louis XV., a Montmorency was convicted of
an atrocious murder. He was punished by a short imprisonment in the
Bastile. His servant and accomplice was, for the same offence at the
same time, broken alive upon the wheel. Is the proposition, that the
angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, more certain than
the ruin of a system under which such a state of things was tolerated?
How, then, does it come to pass, that the same people who cling to one