It is in this momentous and solemn fact that
the great peril and responsibility of human existence lies.
Mr. Babbage has so powerfully expressed this idea in a noble
passage in one of his writings that we here venture to quote his
words: "Every atom," he says, "impressed with good or ill, retains
at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to
it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is
worthless and base; the air itself is one vast library, on whose
pages are written FOR EVER all that man has ever said or whispered.
There, in their immutable but unerring characters, mixed with the
earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever
recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled; perpetuating, in
the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man's
changeful will. But, if the air we breathe is the never-failing
historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air, and ocean,
are, in like manner, the eternal witnesses of the acts we have
done; the same principle of the equality of action and reaction
applies to them. No motion impressed by natural causes, or by
human agency, is ever obliterated. . . . If the Almighty stamped on
the brow of the first murderer the indelible and visible mark of
his guilt, He has also established laws by which every succeeding
criminal is not less irrevocably chained to the testimony of his
crime; for every atom of his mortal frame, through whatever changes
its severed particles may migrate, will still retain adhering to
it, through every combination, some movement derived from that very
muscular effort by which the crime itself was perpetrated.
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