good principle, and spring from passions once noble and generous, but which, having been diverted from their primitive direction, have become degenerate and corrupted.

This law of the universal mixture of good and evil encourages us, as I have observed, to strive to turn obstacles themselves to our advantage. It teaches us to steer our course with caution, yet without fear of being entirely lost, among the rocks and quicksands in the ocean of life. It always furnishes a plank in case of shipwreck, a medium of safety in danger, a resource and subject of consolation in misfortune. It serves also as a compass in the study of the sciences, and offers to the mind, which it keeps constantly on its guard and on the watch, the means of avoiding false processes and vicious methods.* It is, in short, universally applicable, and of real and practical utility in the physical, moral and intellectual, social and political world.

* The invention of gunpowder and artillery has produced good and evil; the invariable result of human operations. But which of the two predominates? This is a question that requires deliberate examination. The same examination ought to precede every judgment that we form respecting persons or things, against whom or which we ought not to suffer ourselves to be lightly prejudiced, by considering them in one point of view only, and that perhaps a wrong one.

As all things in the world are compounded of good and evil, one person looks only at the good side, another only at the bad side of a thing, and each believes his opinion to be well-founded. Such is the origin of mistaken notions, a fertile cause of crimes and misfortunes, of which I at first thought for this reason to make a general, distinct, and separate law, but which in reality are but a branch of the law of the universal compound of good and evil, and a particular consideration, solely relative to the human mind, its operations, and its judgments.

The differences of age, sex, situation, and circumstances, and of education, whether given by men or things, are capable of producing this result. A person who, in his sphere, views an object under a certain number of bearings, judges of it according to those bearings, and may form a correct judgment of it. Another, who, in a more or less extensive, but different sphere, judges of the same object viewed under other bearings, differing entirely or in part, or differently modified, may judge equally well, relatively to his position and his manner of considering the thing (for every thing is relative), and yet come to a diametrically opposite conclusion. Hence the mistakes which frequently proceed from faulty definitions and the imperfection of language; the errors whence

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spring disputes and calamities; the dissensions, public and private, political and religious; the feuds in families, in society, in nations. Those persons then who are duly impressed with this general truth, and with the importance of our law of the universal mixture of good and evil, (whence springs the particular law of mistakes, which exactly determines the frequently delicate and imperceptible causes of those feuds and dissensions, with a view to prevent their effects), ought to be reciprocally tolerant and indulgent, and to allow their fellow-creatures complete freedom of opinion and thought, when such freedom does not tend to produce acts prejudicial to either.

Mistakes, the fertile cause of crimes and calamities, produce, in morals, politics, and the sciences, the greatest part of the evils which afflict mankind, and which it has to impute to itself alone. To attribute to the sciences, says Bacon, the errors or the vices of men of science and scholars, is to impute to the tool the awkwardness of the workman, or to the dagger the guilt of the assassin.

The law of the universal mixture of good and evil, and the particular law of mistakes, find their application in all the social relations, in the daily occurrences of common life, and in the great re

sults of political dissensions. Wherever I see a great effusion of blood, observes Bacon, I am certain that a false end or false measures have been pursued.

The ill that men do to themselves always arises from mistake. They cannot injure one another without deceiving and betraying themselves. This consolatory truth furnishes a point of support to morals, one of the fundamental precepts of which is: Do to others as you would wish them to do to you.

Vices, prejudices, errors, ignorance, crimes, wars, are properly speaking but mistakes. The same may be said of violent passions, which make individuals unhappy, and disturb and ravage society; they are always affections wrongly directed. Vice bespeaks a narrow soul, an unenlightened mind. To no purpose would you instance men of great genius who have been vicious and criminal: I reply with confidence that the malevolent passions to which they addicted themselves stifled part of their natural talents, and that the very abuse of their faculties was the result of the two-fold error of their understandings and their hearts, contracted and corrupted by their reciprocal action and re-action.

One mistakes the nature of glory, and loses his

way.

Erostratus, blinded by a senseless desire of celebrity, thought to immortalize himself by burning the temple of Ephesus. A second is mistaken respecting happiness and true philosophy; he makes himself and those about him miserable. A third, not having proper notions of economy, squanders his fortune and that of his family. A fourth, hurried away by jealousy, and harbouring unjust suspicions, poisons with his own hand the conjugal chalice: he has not properly comprehended the delicate and important point of domestic union. Each of these has viewed the thing which interests and engages him merely in profile, and not in full face. He has taken from it all that was dangerous, but not extracted whatever it contained of good and useful, for the purpose of turning it to his advantage.

If we will be honest with ourselves, we shall be obliged to admit, upon a review of our lives, that we have never been very miserable but through our own fault, and that our complaints and reproaches respecting our situation ought more frequently to be addressed to ourselves than to the Deity, to nature, or to fortune.

O youth, about to launch into the world, and to take in hand the guidance of thy destiny, let me entreat thee to meditate seriously on this im