confirmation, enunciation or confutation of a law,—the material and form employed are both utterly worthless, just as worthless as material and form of popular medicine. Popular medicine and popular morals are closely conceivable one with the other, and should not be so differently estimated, as is still love: both are most dangerous pseudo-sciences.
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Sequence an accessory.—Formerly, the effect of an action was believed to be, not so much a consequence, as a voluntary accessory,—namely from the land of God. Is a greater confusion conceivable? For action and effect one had to make separate efforts with entirely different means and different stratagems!
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The new education of mankind.—All ye who are helpful and well intentioned, lend ye a helping hand in this one endeavour of removing from the world that idea of punishment which has overspread the whole world! No weal more noxious than this! Not only has that idea been applied to the consequences of our actions,—and low terrible and irrational it is to mistake cause and effect for cause and punishment!—but worse than this, by means of this infamous interpretation of the punitive idea, they have robbed the pure accidentality of events of its innocence. Nay, they have gone so far in
