and must be explained away. If the pressure of necessity is really removed just at the very point where the sense of the awful importance of our choice is most intensely realised,—if the iron chain of events by which our course is guided is unclasped, and we are permitted to go either to the right hand or to the left, just when we are most distinctly conscious that a false step is an irretrievable and infinite evil-then we cannot be the offspring of law, or embodiments of definite force. The logic of Atheism is consistent, but fatal to itself. We know that we are morally free; and we know that a free person cannot be the issue of helplessly unfolded laws. It is impossible for necessity to emancipate itself. Only if the observed necessity has been the "must" of a divine free-will, can that "must" be withdrawn, and freedom restored wherever the materials for self-determination have been granted. This identity of all sciences is maintained only at the expense of the falsification of many, and the total abrogation of one. The main facts of man's moral nature,-all those which we indicate by personal responsibility, duty and sin, merit and demerit, praise and blame, reward and retribution,—all those on which the great interests of mankind centre, all which are the life of reverence and love,-are swept away into totally meaningless unreality by this absolute identification of moral science with the natural sciences on the summit of which it stands. It is dangerous enough to scientific reality to confuse intelligence with instinct, and to describe memory as "a weak form" of perception; but it is the suicide of a science to manufacture a theory of moral obligation out of the materials of physical necessity—a theory of vision for the blind.

To those who believe in a personal Creator, on the other hand, all the sciences will keep at once their distinct meaning and their real (not logical) unity. We have seen how Intelligence and Activity have to be traced in any theory which is not theistic through stages in which there is nothing worthy to be called the semblance of either up to their final culmination in man, to whom the former alone is attributed, and all but the faintest ghost of the latter is still denied. Denying the world to a Creator, they are obliged to deny all creative power to the world. But begin with faith in a living Spirit, and it becomes impossible to believe in energy that is not instinct with reason, or in an intelligence that is not the background of action. Force and design are but the different elements of the same creative purpose. There is no force, however constant and determinate, that we can forbear to attribute to free self-determined life. We know that force, though sometimes called material, is always invisible, and that no one ever yet discovered an original fountain of force except in the depths of his own mind. Physical science can indeed

lay bare the contracting muscles and the transmitting nerves; but in its search after the seat of force itself it has to confess itself as unsuccessful as in its gropings after the substance of thought. In volition, and in volition alone, do we become conscious of any creation of force; all the so-called "material forces" are but the mapped-out courses of an invisible power. In the control of passion, the strenuousness of thought, the groaning strain of perseverance, we have the first and purest knowledge of the birth of force; and even though the nerve be paralysed which is the condition of its material manifestation, we are none the less certain that the essence of it is there. If we can conceive force except as activity, if we can conceive activity otherwise than as belonging to a mind, then may we regard force as material. But how is it that, after centuries of history, in which almost all the motion and all the forces on the surface of the earth have originated without human control, we are still as unable as ever even to conceive that either motion or power can originate in a lifeless mass,-unless it be a principle of our nature to refer all change to mind? When Newton discovered for us that every particle of our own bodies is the centre of an attraction that reaches the farthest star, did he discover the secret of a power less or more remarkably instinct with life and intelligence than that of the volition which moves our arm and guides our steps? Has any study of "gravity" ever made a rational man seriously believe that mere clay or granite can reach out its arm on every side into infinite space and regulate its fascination according to the inverse square of the distance? Yet if there be not some radical protest in our nature against believing this, we ought to find no difficulty in it; for all that mere experience teaches us is to refer these forces to a local beginning in particles of apparently inanimate matter; and it is only the positive evidence of our own minds which obliges us to regard these physical points as the organic centre of a spiritual force. It is only because we are obliged to accept Force and Order as the realised forms of a spiritual Will and Reason, that we have not long ago, at Newton's hint of the truth, bowed down in idolatrous worship before natural powers so far exceeding in grasp and precision any thing that human will or reason can comprehend. The only forces we can ourselves put forth are spiritual, and are ordered by our finite intelligence;-and we are compelled to believe that the infinite forces which react upon us, and by which we are hemmed in, are of the same kind; and of their intellectual regulation every day brings us clearer knowledge.

The science of force, then, is itself evidence of an all-pervading spirit to those who will admit as evidence the imperative assertions of their own nature. Thus far we share, in our little

degree, the creative power of God. And so far as physical science is becoming more and more dynamical, we may have some faint glimmering of the meaning and method of creative life. Here, however, our originating power totally ceases. Into the mystery of that higher creation, which is more than the creation of ordered force, we have no glimpse. But this at least we can see, that with every new accession of force there is a corresponding accession in the intellectual complexity of creation, Reason and Will manifesting themselves ever in perfect concord. With the forces which determine chemical combinations comes the development of the distinctive qualities of the inorganic world; with the forces of organic life in the flower and the tree comes the first dawning of that spiritual beauty with which the sense of perfect harmony impresses us, the variety in unity, -the penetration of the loveliness of the whole into the essence of the minutest part. It is not without reason, we believe, that the "argument from design" has fixed so eagerly on organic life. Not that reason is less transparent in the graduated attraction radiated from a pebble than in the lily of the field. But the variety in the latter-every part of which implies a whole, while the whole needs every part-drives out of the mind the bald simplicity of rational formula, replacing it by the rich conceptions of imaginative beauty. A force which we can understand and measure seems almost on a level with us; but organic life comes from a spring we cannot fathom. The equal penetration of every fibre with vital beauty, the perfect incarnation of an ideal conception, the harmony of the whole, express the lavish wealth of intellectual being; while in lower stages of existence there is comparatively but the bare outline of single-phased purpose. You can separate, in imagination at least, the force and the law in physical science; but in organic life the evolution of the former is utterly shrouded in the multiplied and delicate folds of creative thought. And then again, in the world of animal life we have the first hint of a new created object apart from the mere beauty of creation. The appearance of a new subject on the scene, the first dawn of receptive and observing life,—the birth, so mysterious to us, of finite wants,-the first lending of the creative energy to the development of a finite individuality, though as yet its springs of life are entirely commanded from beyond itself, this vast stride in the exercise of creative power is accompanied as before by a vast increase in the fulness and subtlety of intellectual law. Every new energy is, as it were, more and more richly inlaid with intelligence, up to the point at which, in human freedom, the two become separable, in order that we may feel that it is free-will, and not any blind necessity, which determines their cohesion-that they are correlative at

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tributes of one spirit, not mere formally different aspects of the absolute and everlasting identity of an iron fate. In the ascending scale of animal life there is used to some extent almost every material afterwards worked into the nature of man, except his guiding conscience and the freedom which it is given to guide. Images of what man would be, if he could surrender his moral freedom and become a thing ("in perfect correspondence," as Mr. Spencer has it, "with external changes"), abound throughout creation, from the beaver to the tiger, from the butterfly to the bee, from the serpent to the dove; as if to mark by the very closeness of approach the infinite step in creative power made by the transition to the personal life of man. here, immediately on the gift of free power and responsibility, the link of apparent necessity which seemed absolutely to cement together force and intelligence drops away, and there comes in a possibility of folly, failure, evil, unknown to the lower world, marking, as we have said, that the correspondence of intelligence with power in the sciences does not consist in the absolute identity of a self-expanding unit, but in the bond of a living character.*

And

* It is common to object to the view here developed of all force as the mere realised activity of free-will in some spiritual being, and of all intelligence which is not due to the conscious life of man as springing directly from above, that it is pantheistic. The objection is self-destructive if it proceeds from any one who believes that God originally made the world; for clearly nothing is saved, and much lost, by attributing to His fore-ordination what we hesitate to attribute to His present act. The objection, however, that to attribute the ferocity of the lion or the cunning of the fox directly to divine activity is at once unreal, i.e. unlike the truth, and degrading to our religious nature, has a meaning in it, and is worth briefly analysing. First, we believe, that if by this a protest is meant against the doctrine that there is no psychical individuality in animal life-that their body is but a shell as it were for an energy of which Deity is the subject as well as the spring, that their perceptions are but new viaducts from creating power without to the same creating power within,-then the protest is quite just. However absolutely and necessarily dependent the animal world is, we must suppose that there is a real creation of a new subject - a real centre of new finite life; though the springs of that life are held in absolute subordination, and its energies lent,-not only created but ever sustained,-by the universal Spirit. This, however, in no way affects the moral question of the impressions produced upon us by the permanent sanction, so to speak, the constantly sanctioning intelligence,-by which God guides and satisfies instincts so startling. This objection is one which applies equally to every form of faith. And it is but trivial; indeed the difficulty is often created by our fancifully inserting a human freedom and conscience behind the impulses of the animal. Or if that reply be thought evasive, and it be said, "Still, what you deny to be evil in the creature, you attribute to the Creator," it is more than sufficient to answer, "Yes; but the inference as to will and character must not be judged here by the single act, but by the system of invariable law, of which it is a part." It would be l'antheism, perhaps, to interpret the tiger's spring as embodying the immediate moral purpose and character of God, though it be His immediate sustaining power and directing thought which The purpose must be studied, if at all, in the ends answered renders it possible by the certainty of physical law in these lower departments of the universe as combined with the general purposes of animal life. So far as we may really interpret God by single acts, we must keep fast to His free moral relations with our spirits, which are the only accessible expressions of His immediate intent and present thought.

We do not, of course, suppose for a moment that any kind of opinion-theistic or atheistic-would change the inductive method of investigation in each separate science; but we do believe, for the reasons stated, that Atheism leads to the falsest and most misleading theories on the correlation of the sciences, disposing men to ignore real accessions of fact from the desire to make one science an expansion of another. The disposition to explain away new phenomena into old is really rooted in an absolute, if often unconscious, distrust of the possibility of creation. And in this way the misapprehension of the relation between different sciences leads to a deductive, instead of a pure inductive, method with the later and higher science. Thus we find philosophers like Mr. Spencer, instead of examining the moral realities of human life, actually dissipating or distorting them, in the hope of deducing them from physiological assumptions. How could any true Baconian induction dissolve the moral will of man into a contest between a mob of "motor changes" in the brain? The fact obviously is, that the human intellect must and will believe in some cause for human life, and the only choice lies between one that is far greater and one that is far less than that life. If, therefore, we do not reverently accept a higher cause, we are unconsciously obliged so to "treat" and clip the facts as to make them fit into a lower. The unconscious tendency to dissolve away or pinch up the reality is always more or less the result of believing in no antecedents adequate to produce it.

trust.

But we must conclude. We have barely touched on some of the most remarkable indications that man's nature is every way dwarfed by Atheism, and that Science, so far as it gives evidence at all, gives strong evidence of the same kind. Instead of being a source of uneasy fear and suspicion, we have tried to show that, fairly faced, Science adds all its strength to the side of One branch of the subject we have entirely omittedthe evidence of the imagination to the intellectual and spiritual origin of Nature's beauty. There is, we believe, a conviction, amounting to certainty, in every poetic mind, that the face of nature wears as clearly the mysterious impress of an infinite character as the face of man wears the impress of the workings of thought and emotion within. No one ever yet explained why smiles and frowns always convey to all people, and even to the merest infant, the same notions of joy and displeasure. This is a natural language, of which the knowledge is inborn, and which no law of association can explain. We believe confidently that the same is true-with vaguer meanings of the expressive power of Nature,-that all poetic insight sees that it as vividly bears the spiritual stamp of God. But on this we