USING the world as we naturally do, we can attain certain ends and achieve much that we feel desirable. Yet an incurable fatality seems to attend all our actions. Permanent satisfaction fails us. The results will not answer to our hopes, and a mysterious necessity of evil seems to be in the world, that leaves the most sanguine, at last, hopeless of a remedy. This experience is too familiar, and has been described too often, to need any more to be insisted on. But there is an advantage in understanding it, and in seeing that it is no mystery, but a natural and necessary thing. It is the inevitable effect of error. Whoever attempts any work under a false conception, meets with the same experience, as men find in dealing with the world as if it were, in reality, what it seems to them. Under a misapprehension of the true nature of that with which he has to do, a man places certain objects before himself which he feels convinced will ensure what he desires; he uses means in pursuit of these objects with ardour and satisfaction; he rejoices in them, he is assured he will succeed, he seems to himself to have all that is needed for success: -but the end is failure. He is astonished, perplexed, angry; he feels sure there has been some accident, perhaps some precaution omitted, he repeats his efforts.