supernatural punishment, the visitations and limits of which are so difficult to comprehend and form the subject of so much anxious investigation and superstitions four. The community is able to insist on each one of its members making amends to other individuals or the community for the immediate injury which may have followed in the train of his action. It may also wreak a kind of vengeance on the individual for causing the clouds and storm of divine wrath, as supposed effects of his action, to gather over the heads of the community. But it feels every offence of the individual chiefly as its own, and bears the punishment of the one as its own:- “Custom," they wail in their utmost hearts, "has grown lax, if such actions as these are possible." Every individual action, every individual mode of thinking, causes a horror. It is incalculable how much suffering just the rarer, choicer, and more original minds must have undergone in the course of history owing to their ever being looked upon, nay, their looking upon themselves as the evil and dangerous. Originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience under the supreme rule of the morality of custom ; and up to this very moment the heaven of the best, for the same reason, appears gloomier than it needs to be be.
10
Counter-movement of the senses of morality and causality.—In the same proportion as the sense of
