ruler of the universe may be operating by such catastrophes as we have supposed, for the purpose of promoting the ultimate good of his creation. It will thus be seen that such a question as that immediately before us cannot be settled without discussing the question of the existence and discoverability of final causes in the constitution and laws of the physical creation.

Consider now another instance. It is not exaggeration to affirm that our present material civilization is built upon the belief, that iron will continue to exhibit its well-known attributes of hardness, tenacity, and non-explosiveness. There is, however, no natural absurdity in supposing that the earth may come into such different relations to the forces operating in the universe that iron shall lose some of these properties, and become utterly unreliable for the purposes to which it is now put. Indeed, the forces of nature are so multifarious, and their interactions so nearly infinite, that it is well nigh absurd for us to speak of the uniformity of its working in material things. Everything changes. There may be a conservation of force, but there are infinite changes of form. This is especially noticeable in the organic world. Both the Darwinians and their opponents admit that nature is not uniform in her products, but works on a line of development. It has come to be a postulate in natural history that nature

never exactly repeats herself. On any theory, when one species dies its place is somehow supplied by a new species. Absolute uniformity is not proved to be a law of nature anywhere in the physical world. To be valid our reasoning must take into consideration not merely the nature of the things themselves, but as well the nature of all things acting upon them and modifying them.

3. But as has just been remarked, we cannot avoid considering the question of our ability to discover final causes in the phenomena about us. As this subject is still obscured by an indefinite use of language, it will facilitate matters to draw what we consider to be the real distinction between deduction and induction. Deduction may be defined as the process by which man enlarges his knowledge of the things that have no dependence upon a personal Creator. Time, space, and the moral law in its highest sense are not objects of creation. They are necessary forms under which all creation proceeds. Pure mathematics and moral philosophy deal theoretically with these forms. These sciences are built up wholly and purely by deduction.

Inductive logic, on the other hand, deals with the particular facts occurring under the necessary forms with which deduction has to do—facts which depend upon the action of a personal Creator. In this realm no other than inductive, or what is

really the same thing, analogical, reasoning is possible. The problem of inductive reasoning, however, is not so forbidding as would appear at first glance, for we have a body of experimental facts to guide us toward a conclusion. We are not compelled, as some suppose, to evolve the whole conception of nature out of our own consciousness. We are not left to foretell from a priori knowledge what the Creator would do under the all-pervading conditions of infinite space, eternal time, and a perfect moral law.

In inductive reasoning we start with the facts of experience, and proceed upon the assumption (the ground of which we do not here discuss) that the Creator works in accordance with the highest wisdom for the highest good of being. In this conception the "good of being" is the absolute, final cause of the creation, both when considered as a whole and in its several parts. No statement less general than this meets all the conditions of the problem. No single and limited, good can be assigned as the final cause of any contrivance in nature. The real final cause of any contrivance in nature is the sum of all the uses to which it is ever to be put. Any use to which a contrivance in nature is put, we may be sure formed a part of the Creator's purpose in causing it to be. An element in making up the final cause of the existence of a particular tree,

for example, is the good the birds get out of it in building their nests in its branches. But the birds would be very far from the truth were they to regard that good as exhausting the purposes for which the tree exists. A part of the manifest design of the human form is to embody ideas of physical beauty, and to serve man's temporal pleasure and convenience. But it may be as difficult for us to tell beforehand just how great a share of the final causes of the creation of our bodies consists of the good thus derived, as for the swallows to tell what portion of the final cause for building the barn consisted in the convenience it affords them for the purposes of nest-building. In a world where there is, without question, moral disorder we cannot tell, without going beyond the evident limit of human acquirements, how much of physical deformity and ugliness is necessary for discipline.

Taking the facts as we find them, it would be difficult for us to say in so plain a case apparently, for instance, as that of the final cause for the existence of our teeth, whether they were chiefly designed to assist the stomach in digestion, or for purposes of moral discipline through their liability to disease and decay. They certainly do not assist the stomach as much as they might.

Recurring to the idea that beauty and grace in the human form are the final cause of its being

shaped as it is, we'would ask where is the ground of confidence that that element of beauty which undoubtedly enters as one factor in the sum of good composing the final cause of the creation of some individuals and some races may not in other circumstances be overborne by such moral considerations as require that ugliness of physical form and inconvenience of locomotion shall be the general result? Who but he that knows all things shall say beforehand that a race of beings with their heads anywhere but on their shoulders might not be a necessary accompaniment of certain developments of sini.e. necessary for the highest good? Who would be so bold as to say that nowhere, never, shall human beings be found in bodies conforming to the grotesque and horrid shapes that filled the imagination of Dante? Are there not, in fact, many deformities of disease which well nigh realize some of the strangest of his visions of bodily deformity in "Inferno"?

And as matter of fact, other peculiarities of anatomical structure, like the appearance of rudimentary forms for which there can be no assignable use discovered, are as persistent in their continuance as is that of the relation of the head to the spinal column. So that practically we must fall back upon Mill's process of solving the paradox, viz. that the statement that men existed with heads beneath their shoulders would have