ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts than our thoughts. Moral ends are infinitely superior to material ends.

Let it not be supposed, however, that we are left in total ignorance of the ideas of God. If we were we could not reason at all. In proportion as we come to understand the most imperative wants of our spiritual nature, we shall be able to discern the significance of the things that surround us. Hence, we may assume as a corollary from God's love that the exhibition of his veracity will be of such kind as to give us opportunity to supply our wants-the wants which he has created. This follows also from his wisdom, which has made everything adapted to everything else.

Now one of man's deepest needs is that of a tolerable degree of uniformity in the material and spiritual facts which he takes as a basis on which to build his character. It is not absolute reign of proximate laws that is needed; for that would not sufficiently educate his spiritual powers. Man needs uniformity enough to serve as a basis for practical morality. He needs uncertainty enough to develop his sagacity. He requires that changes should approach slowly enough to give his limited understanding fair opportunity to adapt itself to the varying circumstances. It is of prime importance that proximate causes should be so permanent and of such ease of apprehension, as properly

to develop our sagacity, and to reward us with an amount of certainty such that we can make safe calculation concerning the future.

If it be objected that in the use of the words “tolerable,” “fair," "properly," etc., and in the involved structure of the sentence the meaning is left somewhat vague, the answer is that it is important to leave the statement just as vague as the facts. The rule can at best be only approximate. Inductive reasoning, as Hamilton truly says, can never be demonstrative. Its conclusions have only a greater or less degree of probability. In many cases the observations may have been so extensive that the probability would hardly be distinguished from a certainty. In chemical science, for example, the appearance of certain phenomena may be taken as almost demonstrative evidence that other definite possibilities of phenomena are permanently connected with those that come under the field of observation. To take an example that has only theoretical importance, we rely with great confidence upon the revelations of the spectroscope concerning the nature of the light that comes to us from the sun and stars, and rest assured that if we could get at them with other tests, we should find the burning substances which furnish the light of those orbs exhibiting the whole group of phenomena that are known to be connected with the corresponding lines of light,

as it is spread out on the spectrum of various burning metals that we experiment on here. It is very clear that moral beings, like ourselves, could not attain the "summum bonum" in any such state of uncertainty as would exist if phenomena, cross-questioned as those of chemical science are, could not be depended upon as practically permanent,-not permanent forever, perhaps, but as affording safe ground for calculation, somewhat as the ice on our northern rivers furnishes good roads for a season, though nothing but the low degree of the heat it possesses keeps it from running like any other water.

Of all the contrivances adapting things to this need of the moral nature for tolerable permanence of phenomena, perhaps the most wonderful is that constitution of society resulting in the fact that the number of births, marriages, and deaths, and various other social events, in a large section of country usually remains for long periods about as uniform from year to year as anything that appears in the purely physical world. Here is uniformity without sameness of substance, in the ordinary acceptance of that word, and such as to afford a basis for political and social organizations.

In attempting to discover these uniformities, our supposed knowledge of the specific ends essential to the final end of all creation must be used with the greatest caution. Our success depends

upon the exercise of such accuracy, comprenensiveness, and discrimination in the observation of facts that the veracity of God shall be implicated in our conclusions. With our moral natures and needs such as they are, God's actions which are seen become, within certain indefinite limits, promises of what shall be in the future. If we can only interpret it, one part of what God does truly represents the whole of what he does. This corollary, which results from our primitive belief in God's wisdom and benevolence, as related to the wants which he has impressed upon our nature, lies at the bottom of all our confidence in inductive reasoning. We have to do in this realm first of all with final causes, as defined above. And secondly, with the marks in creation, which reveal what, with that end in view, the actual plan of divine wisdom is. The moral nature of man really furnishes the inductive philosopher with the postulates upon which he bases his reasoning. The assumption of a supreme designer, and of a final cause, accompanies the man of science at every step of his progress. He does not prove divine goodness and wisdom; he studies their manifestations.1

Mill2 defines a complete induction as "one in

1 For the ground of this assumption consult the author's Logic of Christian Evidences, pp. 75-87.

2 Examination of Ham., Vol. ii. p. 162, note.

which the nature of the instances is such that no other result than the one arrived at is consistent with the universal law of causation." This definition may be accepted with the proviso that the universal law shall be understood as that which is in the realm of final causes, as defined above. To speak of any universal law of causation short of that, i.e. among efficient causes, as Mill understands them, is pure dogmatism. No universal law of causation can be proved outside the realm of final causes; and in that realm we are absolutely sure only of the corollaries flowing from the assumed wisdom and goodness of God.

In this view induction is only another word for interpretation-interpretation of the ideas of God as they are revealed in creation through the phenomena of matter and of mind.

IV. The line of reflection in which this discussion leads is of very great importance at the present time. The looseness of thought concerning final causes so habitual with some schools of theology, the positive manner in which certain proximate and, for all we know, incidental ends are fixed upon by many as the final cause for particular forms of development in nature, and the tendency of the intuitional school of philosophy to bring into the discussion some things as intuitions which are not, greatly embarrass us in our discussion with men of leanings to what is called