"In living bodies," he argues, "variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years; and during each year in millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?"* This reference to the Creator seems a complementary allusion rather than a necessity of the author's logic, since the theory really denies to the Creator any personal superintendence of his works or any direct agency in producing them; while it personifies the laws of nature as intelligent powers. Indeed, with Schelling, it goes to the extent of endowing Nature with creative self-activity. Darwin puts this in so many words, when he says that "Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being, in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life."+ What then is the Creator but an Emersonian Fate: "Let us build altars," chants the high priest of Pantheism, "to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece. Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the Necessity, which rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no contingencies; that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence,-not personal nor impersonal,-it disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw in all its omnipotence." And what is this again but the transcendent negation of the Hegelian philosophy, that pure and unde

termined existence is pure Nothing." The personality of God vanishes before such a personification of Law.

This deification of natural law is the latest canon of worship in the "Westminster" and at Oxford. Step by step, says the Westminster Review,*"the notion of evolution by law is transforming the whole field of our knowledge and opinion. It is not one order of conception which comes under its influence, but it is the whole sphere of our ideas, and with them the whole system of our action and conduct. Not the physical world alone is now the domain of inductive science, but the moral, the intellectual and the spiritual are being added to its empire." And Baden Powell wrote, in the Essay cited at the head of this Article, that "the simple but grand truth of the law of conservation, and the stability of the heavenly motions, now well understood by all sound cosmical philosophers, is but the type "—of what?— the Divine wisdom of providence?-no; "the type of the universal self-sustaining and self-evolving powers which pervade all Nature." And again, "Mr. Darwin's masterly volume on the Origin of Species by the law of natural selection-which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists-the originization of new species by natural causes-must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favor of the grand principle of the selfevolving powers of nature."+

This transformation of phenomenal laws into self-evolving powers is certainly an abuse of the inductive principle. The sphere of phenomenal laws is too narrow for the interpretation of the whole order of Nature. It is as if the mechanical philosopher, arguing from the perfect adaptations and wonderful results of certain mechanical forces, should maintain that the universe is made up of such forces; whereas chemical affinity is a law or force of a higher order than the mechanical, and sometimes includes this; and then the chemist should say: "I have discovered the original and highest principles of nature, in the chemical forces of my laboratory;"

* October, 1860, Art. Neo-Christianity.

Recent Inquiries, p. 151

Ibid., p. 157.

but vital powers are of a higher order than either mechanical or chemical forces, and include them both; and then the physiologist should say: "I have discovered the essential life of nature in these vital powers: "-and yet, what physiologist has given a "precise, tenable, and consistent" definition of life? And when we pass into Biology, and begin to discuss the soul as an animating principle or essence, we are already within the confines of that spiritual and invisible world, where we must admit the action of powers that our senses cannot measure. But to rest in particular laws is to rest upon the surface of things; or at least to carry our dissection of nature no deeper than the cuticle. And a materialistic philosophy is only superficial. As Bacon has said: "a little natural philosophy inclines men to atheism; but depth in philosophy always brings them about to religion. For while the mind looks upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes go no further; but when it beholds the chain of them collected and linked together, it must needs have recourse to Providence and a Deity."

To rest in ascertained physical laws as first causes, is much as if an inventor should become so enamored of the working of his own machine, as to rate it above the mind that had invented it; and should worship the product of his own hands as a creating force. Whereas the true logic of the machine is-if this adaptation of mechanical powers is so wonderful, how much more wonderful the mind that discovered or conceived it, and how infinitely greater than both the Author of that mind and of the physical forces which its ingenuity has brought together in the machine. Having admired first the crude forces and materials of nature, and next these as combined by invention, and then the genius of the inventor, can we stop short of the great thought of God? In the Patent Office one is continually reminded of the supremacy of the human intelligence over inert matter. Now, the universe is the "patent office" of the Creator, from whose material combinations He can no more be precluded than perpetual motion can be invented or evolved from mechanical forces.

The physical universe is a storehouse of immeasurable

treasures, shut up under a combination-lock; particular sciences are the prongs of the key which man adjusts to various tumblers, until he spells out the magic word and opens the lock. How childish, how absurd, to claim that these sciences, or the laws which they combine into a system, made the lock, and stored the treasury! Yet such is the logic of materialism; and that result is possible only to minds that move in the tread-mill of physical laws, till they imagine these to be the final seat and source of power.

A tendency toward materialism, in students of physical science, is found also in the pride of human reason in its own discoveries. In the ages of his ignorance man worshiped the powers and phenomena of nature as gods. But now that science has put him en rapport with these mysterious powers, so that the philosopher of our times sits tete-a-tete with Thor and Wodin, Osiris, Neptune, and Jupiter Tonans, the pride of this conquest over nature makes man averse to the thought of a higher power. The more he magnifies nature, the more he magnifies himself. When Galileo, by long straining his vision toward the distant glories of the heavens, had brought on total blindness, he said to a friend, "These heavens, this earth, this universe, which by powerful observation I had enlarged a thousand times beyond the belief of past ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow space which I occupy myself. So it pleases God; it shall, therefore, please me also." Galileo meekly acquiesced in this calamity as a divine dispensation. But there are scientists who shrink the universe into the narrow space which themselves occupy, yet do not know that they are blind. Their mental perception is coated with films of pride.

Science, of course, is to be determined as to its facts and laws, purely by observation and reflection. It lies wholly within the domain of Reason. Neither imagination nor faith can have part in its processes. But reason is the mere organ of scientific discovery. It creates no facts; it imparts no powers. In the domain of physical science man is only an observer; and whether his telescope, like Newton's, measure

nine inches, or, like Lord Rosse's, is elongated to sixty feet, he is but an observer still. The fact that Newton made his first reflector with his own hands, led a contemporaneous continental author to suppose that he was a maker of optical instruments;-" Artifex quidam Anglus nomine Newton." Some modern scientists go to the opposite extreme of regarding him almost as the author of the great law which he enunciated-more an architect than a discoverer. It is a common opinion with such reasoners, that "the invention of printing was the chief cause of the Reformation, that the invention of the compass brought about the discovery of America, and that the vast changes in the military and political state of Europe since the middle ages, have been wrought by the invention of gunpowder. It would be almost as rational to say that the cock's crowing makes the sun rise. . . . . These very inventions had existed, the greatest of them for many centuries, in China, without producing any like result. is not a whit to choose between the worship of steam, and that of the meanest Fetish in Africa. Nor is the worship of Man really nobler or wiser.”*

....

There

Reason delights to conceive of itself as possessing a certain architectural power over the physical universe; and this pride of Reason tends to atheism. Yet how much more rational the homage that Newton and Kepler rendered to God as the author of that wondrous harmony of nature which they severally discovered. When Kepler, after nearly twenty years of laborious calculation, had discovered the three grand laws that regulate the orbits, the motions, and the periodic times of the planetary bodies, losing himself in the vastness of the Creator's glory, he exclaimed: "I think thy thoughts after thee, O God!" He concludes one of his astronomical works with the following prayer: "It remains only that I should now lift up to heaven my eyes and hands from the table of my studies, and humbly and devoutly supplicate the Father of lights. O thou, who by the light of nature dost enkindle in us a desire after the light of grace, that by this thou mayest trans

*Hare's "Guesses at Truth," p. 70.