have been accustomed to, and on how widely the new differs from the
old, but in no case can we fuse and assimilate more than a very
little new at a time without exhausting our tempering power--and
hence presently our temper.

Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though de minimis non
curat lex,--though all the laws fail when applied to trifles,--yet
too sudden a change in the manner in which our ideas are associated
is as cataclysmic and subversive of healthy evolution as are
material convulsions, or too violent revolutions in politics. This
must always be the case, for change is essentially miraculous, and
the only lawful home of the miracle is in the microscopically small.
Here, indeed, miracles were in the beginning, are now, and ever
shall be, but we are deadened if they are required of us on a scale
which is visible to the naked eye. If we are told to work them our
hands fall nerveless down; if, come what may, we must do or die, we
are more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If we are required
to believe them--which only means to fuse them with our other ideas-
-we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds being in
the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have
fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds
swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and pro
tanto kill our souls. If we stick out beyond a certain point we go
mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and
yet upon a small scale these same miracles are the breath and
essence of life; to cease to work them is to die. And by miracle I
do not merely mean something new, strange, and not very easy of
comprehension--I mean something which violates every canon of
thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed to respect;
something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in