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'While, then, resumed Arbaces, 'our fathers of the Nile thus achieved the first elements by whose life chaos is destroyed, namely, the obedience and reverence of the multitude for the few, they drew from their majestic and starred meditations that wisdom which was no delusion: they invented the codes and regularities of law the arts and glories of existence.
And similarly went it with my poor epic: scarcely had a general plan suggested itself to my musings, and divers particular morsels thereof assumed "their unpremeditative lay;" scarcely had I jotted down a staid synopsis, and a goodly array of metrical specimens; when some intrusive newspaper displayed to me in black and white a good-natured notice of somebody else's 'Home, an Epic. So, as in the case of 'Nero, and haply of other subjects, had it come to pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another false start; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been self-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, the flag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly into the pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and all those pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another.
Yet another influence, arising from the domestication of large beasts, arises from the fact that these creatures are important storehouses of food; their flesh spares men the labor of the chase, and so promotes those regularities of employment which lead men into civilized ways of life.
If, however, we cannot thus observe and calculate on certain regularities and tendencies in the world as we know it, then, not only is the appearance of design and finality an illusion, not only is that particular argument for theism cut away, but with it goes all scientific certainty, all that stands between us and the most hopeless mental and moral scepticism.
In spite of these difficulties, it must, of course, be admitted that many fairly dependable regularities of sequence occur in daily life. It is these regularities that have suggested the supposed law of causality; where they are found to fail, it is thought that a better formulation could have been found which would have never failed.
Considered as a fact, it is the statement of observed processes, and belongs to positive science like the observed courses of the planets, or any other observed regularities and uniformities.
Now, if I take any single organism and study it carefully, simply as a biologist or physiologist, I shall recognize in it certain regularities of structure and function and development, upon which I can found various arguments and predictions.
When we strip their dramas of these rich and splendid ornaments, when, for the glowing colours of their romance and the musical variations of the rhymed strophes in which they are composed, we compel them to assume the monotony of the Alexandrine, and submit to the fetters of external regularities, while the character and situations are allowed to remain essentially the same, there can no longer be any harmony between the subject and its mode of treatment, and it loses that truth which it may still retain within the domain of fancy.
For my part, I almost long for the old days of knight-errantry, and would rather be knocked on the head by a giant, or carried through the air by a flying griffin, than live in this circle of dull regularities, the brute at the mill." "You may live even in these days," answered St. John, "without too tame a regularity.
In the contemplation of that uniformity in the course of nature, which is assumed in every inference from experience, one of the first observations that present themselves is, that the uniformity in question is not properly uniformity, but uniformities. The general regularity results from the co-existence of partial regularities.
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