Note (return) — Chapter IV

'Excepting,' he says, 'the degree of uncertainty, which still exists as to the extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and the physical circumstances on which these may be dependent, (considerations which are of secondary importance when we are considering mankind in the average or en masse), I believe most competent judges will agree that the general laws of the different constituent elements of human nature are even now sufficiently understood to render it possible for a competent thinker to deduce from those laws, with a considerable approach to certainty, the particular type of character which would be formed, in mankind generally, by any assumed set of circumstances.'[39]