This first divine law of nature, if we may so speak, by virtue of which labour and struggle became from the beginning the destiny of man, has retained its full force through all succeeding ages, and is applicable alike to every class, and every nation, to each individual as well as to mankind in general, to the most important, as to the most insignificant, relations of society. He who weakly shrinks from the struggle, who will offer no resistance, who will endure no labour nor fatigue, can neither fulfil his own vocation, whatever it be, nor contribute aught to the general welfare of mankind.--But since man hath been the prey of discord, two different wills have contended within him for the mastery--a divine and a natural will. Even his freedom is no longer that happy freedom of celestial peace--the freedom of one who hath conquered and triumphed--but a freedom, as we now see it--the freedom of undetermined choice--of arduous, still undecided, struggle. To return to the divine will, or the one conformable to God--to restore harmony between the natural and the divine will, and to convert and transform more and more the lower, earthly and natural will into the higher, and divine one, is the great task of mankind in general, as of each individual in particular. And this return--this restoration--this transformation--all the endeavours after such--the progress or retrogressions in this path--constitute an essential part of universal history, so far as this embraces the moral development and intellectual march of humanity.--But the fact that man, so soon as he loses the internal sheet-anchor of truth and life--so soon as he abandons the eternal law of divine ordinance, falls immediately under the dominion of nature, and becomes her bondsman, each individual may learn from his own interior, his own experience, and a survey of life; since the violent, disorderly might of passion herself is only a blind power of nature acting within us. Although this fact is historical, and indeed the first of all historical facts, yet as it belongs to all mankind, and recurs in each individual, it may be regarded as a psychological fact and phenomenon of human consciousness. And on this very account it does not precisely fall within the limits of history, and it precedes all history; but all the consequences or possible consequences of this fact, all the consequences that have really occurred, are within the essential province of history.