Why should the use of its sting inflict injury, if not death, upon the bee? nevertheless its properties are largely mod- | not very wonderful that men who have ified. The molecular weight of ozone spent a lifetime in the study of a small the new form of oxygen produced by the part of the wonders of eye or ear should action of the electric discharge is known be incredulous, first, as to the importance, to be one and a half times greater than and then as to the reality of that which that of ordinary oxygen. But nevertheless eye hath not seen nor ear heard. It is not no complete explanation of the facis of at all wonderful that what they disbelieve which this special fact is a representative, should assume, for average persons, the has yet been given. Allotropy remains a garb of superstition. We are apt to omit residual phenomenon in chemical science. all nice investigation of the qualifications Many animal instincts, e.g. the curious of those who have proved their power to instinct which prompts the cuckoo to lay a benefit us, and the study by which men single egg in a nest not her own, connected have almost annihilated distance, baffled as this instinct undoubtedly is with the pain, multiplied every convenience of life, similar but less perfectly developed instinct and covered the civilized world with traces of the American Molothrus bonariensis, of triumphant skill, might have been forehave not as yet been completely brought seen to be the study which should set the within the sphere of any wide generaliza- key-note of truth. Hence the numerous tion. attempts at a reconciliation of science and religion which, if they prove nothing else, prove the need of a reconciliation, while the timid, propitiatory tone of theology shows that the position of these ancient foes is almost inverted. A new kind of orthodoxy is springing up among us, expressed through the physician, rather than the clergyman, and the old orthodoxy betrays an uneasy recognition of its own attitude and of a large part of its former power in its dangerous rival. The change is as yet imperfectly accomplished, and we look for a great increase of all the negative inferences from the teaching of science, before men return to other sources of truth. In the mean time, we are inclined to welcome any distinct and frank avowal of these negative inferences. We consider that they are more hostile to the welfare of mankind than all the discoveries of modern science are beneficial to it, but we are glad that they should be definitely expressed, rather than vaguely hinted, or elaborately implied. Why do variations in structure or function arise suddenly in various animals? These questions, and many questions similar to these, await their full explana tion. Science advances by slow but sure steps; she carefully propounds hypotheses, and carefully marks off those phenomena which these hypotheses leave' unexplained. She is aware that the phenomena occurring in that immense sphere assigned to her, are not always to be explained by one, but often by many hypotheses. Phenomenon is modified by phenomenon. Law reacts upon law. All, she knows, is lawful, but all is not yet intelligible. With patience and sure faith she advances to the goal; the road is long, but the reward is great. M. M. PATTISON MUIR. CAMBRIDGE: March 1879. From The Spectator. THERE are not many unbiassed and capable persons among us who would deny that the increased knowledge of the natural world, which is the most marked characteristic of our day, has been accompanied, in almost direct proportion, by a decreased belief in the supernatural. The fact that courage is now often needed to avow opinions which courage was formerly always needed to disavow, has a real connection with the general interest in science. It is *A Candid Examination of Theism. By "Physi cus." London: Trübner. The Atheistic Controversy. By F. W. Newman. Contemporary Review. October, 1878. The belief that when we have catalogued the data of the senses, we have completed the inventory of existence, has been hinted at or implied often and often; but the work named below presents us with the first example, so far as we know, of a distinct acceptance of this belief expressed in the English language, and addressed to the average reader. It seems to us to proceed from an earnest, able, and candid mind, disciplined rather in the study of science than of philosophy, and overrating, as is natural, the advantages of the scientific student on philosophic ground. It has been noticed, in an interesting article by Mr. F. W. Newman, which we regret that our limits forbid our noticing further than by saying that it contains, in our opinion, a pregnant suggestion as to the true quar ter from which the reaction towards faithness must be transitory. The twilight of will originate, on the ground of science. faith is of varying length in different spirWe ourselves notice it from a different itual latitudes, but it must soon end in all. point of view. The volume which first The objects that become unreal to the accepts atheism as the creed of science, intellect cannot long remain dear to the whatever its intrinsic interest, is interest- heart. The void may be filled co.npletely, ing mainly as a sign of the times. And for the nature may so contract, that that in the singular candor with which opposing man which desired the infinite may be satarguments are weighed, as well as the isfied with the indefinite, and an endless great reluctance with which their result succession of ephemeral beings may open has been accepted, makes the appearance a vista that shall seem to replace the endof this little volume a fitting occasion for less hope for every individual among them. an inquiry into the meaning of the change The yearning that binds shattered lives that has come over the world of thought. here to healing influences elsewhere, and The author has, he informs us, not broken feels a patient God the fellow-worker in all a chain, but surrendered a treasure, to gain efforts that would raise the fallen, may, in his present position. We will let him the marvellous change which follows the speak for himself, in language which we loss of a profound conviction, be regarded will not allow ourselves to regard as dra- as selfishness. He who has ceased to matic. He declares it to be the result of believe in an invisible world will soon find an honest attempt to answer the question the visible one a satisfactory abode, and he has taken as his motto," Canst thou by even come to regard all other feelings but searching find out God?" that, — satisfaction as unreasonable and wrong. Still, every one who occupies the past position of " Physicus," and perhaps a few who occupy his present one, will be thankful that the avowal of disbelief was made in that fugitive moment when the thing lost seemed precious. Whether I regard the problem of Theism on the lower plane of strictly relative probability, or on the higher plane of purely formal considerations, it equally becomes my obvious duty to stifle all belief of the kind which I conceive to be the noblest, and to discipline my intellect with regard to this matter into an While fully at one with "Physicus" as attitude of the purest scepticism. And foras- to the bearing of the science of the faith much as I am far from being able to agree of our day, in its broad, general aspect, we with those who affirm that the twilight doc- would take exception to some of the detrine of the "new faith" is a desirable substi- tails. He writes as if the modern man of tute for the waning splendor of "the old," I science, like the conquering Pompey, had am not ashamed to confess that with this vir- penetrated to the Holy of Holies, and tual negation of God, the universe to me has found it empty. We should not so map lost its soul of loveliness; and although from henceforth the precept to "work while it is out the march of the new invaders of our day" will doubtless but gain an intensified Holy Land. We cannot give the disforce, the terribly intensified meaning of the coveries of our own day the proportion, in words that "the night cometh when no man the general result, which he assigns to can work," yet, when at times I think, as think them. It is only in the present day, no at times I must, of the appalling contrast be- doubt, that a strong interest in the visible tween the hallowed glory of that creed which world has been linked with a decided disonce was mine, and the lonely mystery of ex- belief in the invisible. But the tendency, istence as now I find it, -at such times, I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the The first elaborate attempt at a system of now fully manifest, was always latent. sharpest pang of which my nature is suscepti-nature was the first elaborate assertion of ble. For whether it be due to my intelligence not being sufficiently advanced to meet the requirements of the age, or whether it be due to the memory of those sacred associations which to me, at least, were the sweetest that life has given, I cannot but feel that for me, and for others who think as I do, there is a dreadful 61 truth in those words of Hamilton, - Philos ophy having become a meditation, not merely of death, but of annihilation, the precept Know thyself has become transformed into the terrific oracle of Edipus, —li Mayest thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art." atheism. We have often been surprised at the small attention which the physicists of our day have paid to the most original of their predecessors, who is also the one original thinker on the illustrious_roll of Roman literature. The poet from whom a Gray has borrowed some of his most pathetic lines might (though we are well assured he has not) have proved a mine of suggestion for the discoveries of a Darwin. The anticipation of the theory of natural selection on the page of LucreMournful words! and yet the most mourn- tius has been doubtless often noticed, and ful conviction they rouse is that their sad-grotesque as is this first edition of the great scientific discovery of our day, we do not see that the variation between it and that familiar to us is other than one of detail. The idea of a set of anomalous births, creatures who came into existence as rough sketches from nature's hand, to be thrown aside and perish, till she arrived at the conception of a being fitted to live and reproduce its kind, this contains in germ all that we have been taught to receive as the latest deliverance of science on the origin of species. And this is no more than the most important instance of an anticipation of the principles of modern science to be found in the pages of Lucretius. Indeed, we should say that the poem "On Nature" needs only a different set of illustrations to furnish the modern naturalist with a set of weapons against the supernaturalist, quite as effective as any he could find in the pages of a Spencer or a Huxley. Of course, therefore, we must consider that, from a philosophic point of view, "Physicus" enormously overrates the influence of the discovery of the correlation of force. It would be impossible to overrate this last, probably, as a contribution to science. The work of Mr. Justice Grove, in which it first received literary expression, high as is the place it occupies in public estimate, seems to us to deserve one yet higher. Still we cannot see in it anything more, as a contribution to philosophy, than an expansion, richly illustrated, of the laws of movement, as they are formulated in the "Principia." It pursues the principles Newton there grasps and defines into regions where the mere sense fails to follow them. It takes up the idea there latent of indestructible force, and carries on its history when, to the unassisted eye, it has ceased to exist. Movement, men learnt from Newton, is perpetual in the heavens, from the mere absence of any impediment to bring it to a pause, not from any distinction of things earthly and things heavenly. Movement, men learn from the physicists of our day, inferred by the mind when it can no longer be discerned by the eye, is no less perpetual on earth. Surely the last principle might, the moment molecular physics existed, have been evolved from the first. We cannot see that the power to follow with quantitative appreciation the change of one force into another, adds anything to the conviction that within the circle of nature the forces that seem destroyed must be really transformed; any more than the power to estimate a man's income in French or English money adds any thing to the conviction that the two figures must represent the same sum. It seems to us, therefore, that if the ideas of "the persistence of force and the primary quali ties of matter" render "the theory of theism in any shape superfluous," that theory is rendered superfluous by the mere conception of a "natura dadala rerum." To connect many effects with one cause is a necessity of our intellectual being, but there is a point of view from which one self-existent reality is as good as another. When the intellect is in contact with the idea of a body of laws bound up in mutual interdependence, so that each depends on all, and all on each (and this, after all, was always the scientific view of the world), it is in contact with that ultimate, inexplicable simplicity, which is all the mere intellect can discern in the will of God. But the notion that this is all the spirit of man can discern in the will of God, is a characteristic of our own day. Never before has it been thought unreasonable that the intellect should take cognizance of the data of our whole being, moral as well as sensible, or have ordinary human beings considered that while the senses proved their object by their action, the emotions were shut out from any right of a similar testimony till their veracity was guaranteed from elsewhere. And while, on the one hand, the faculties which come in contact with the divine have been called upon, for the first time, to prove their own existence in the face of hostile criticism, on the other, all the inferences which the intellect has hitherto supplied towards justifying them have been sensibly retrenched. For it is only in our own day that the idea of natural law has invaded the idea of creation. Most scientific thinkers, before a time that an old person can remember, thought that at some particular epoch an event took place that they would all have described as a stupendous miracle. No doubt this was disbelieved by individuals, but it was the ordinary assumption. Nor was there anything in the older discoveries to shake it. The idea of gravitation - the largest, we still believe, that science has ever originated-does not in any way tend to exclude the idea of a beginning of things. It belongs to a different region. But we cannot say this of the scientific ideas of our day. They make natural law in time what Newton made it in space. He raised it to share the infinity of the world, - they, to share the eternity of God. It is not wonderful, surely, that such a change as this should modify pro foundly the intellectual ground-work on form the measure of certainty, has no place which men seek to justify faith, and that whatever in the world of faith. This outthe cosmic speculations of our day should ward order in which we live appeals to put a strain on our belief in God which various faculties, and obtrudes itself on was not imposed on it by those of our our belief at once by the cumulative force fathers. And perhaps it is not wonderful and the nice agreement of their various that the absorbing interest of the outward testimony. Sight and touch, different as world, and the incessant illustration of they are, send us in reports of things exphysical truth, and the imperiousness of all ternal to us, which, wherever we can comthat part of our nature which it concerns, pare them, turn out to be perfectly harmoand which it aids so powerfully, should nious. The blind man can judge of form. deafen our ears to the voices which do not The deaf man can feel the vibration of insist upon being heard. From this sound. No privation of sense incapacidouble cause, at any rate, it happens that tates a man for some estimate of the evithe arguments to support a belief in God, dence of sense. But no vibration can reviewed in the pages of "Physicus," will correct the deaf ear, no touch can correct seem eminently unsatisfactory to those the blind eye, when we deal with the who entirely concur in the conclusion at things of the spirit. Such a correction is, which they aim. The men whom they indeed, not only impossible, but, under satisfied meant, by proof, something differ- the present limitations of our nature, inent from what the materialists of our age conceivable. If the analogy were comdo. They were looking out for a line of plete here, if we could set the object of thought which should justify the spirit to spiritual vision in that focus of convergent the intellect. They thought it was possi- faculties occupied by every object of our ble to trace in the constitution of our intel- sensible vision, and guarantee or supplelectual being certain peculiarities which ment the faltering testimony of one witcorresponded to the demands of our spir-ness with the distinctness of a quite sepaitual being, and to their conscious satis-rate report from another, it is hard to see faction. They did not believe that any how faith could exist. The word would words of theirs could open the eyes of the blind. It is not wonderful that arguments which suited the earlier need break down under the strain of that which is felt in our day. so change its meaning, that some other would more fitly express the reality. Perhaps we are apt to forget how much we exclude, when we speak of having faith in a fellow-man. If we have known the integrity of his motives, as we know that snow is white, we may approve and esteem the character, but for trust there is no The attempt to crowd into a space somewhat narrow for our original object (an appreciation of the influence of science on Faith), any answer to a question so gigan-room. Such a knowledge, we may be told, tic as that which concerns the appropriate would be impossible. True, the knowlevidence for a spiritual world, can only be edge of man, no less than the knowledge made here in the briefest form. Mr. New- of God, is founded on faith. Only the man's essay would lead to a region in knowledge of the external world excludes which the voice of science itself supplies it. Only an age in which knowledge this evidence. To one who has an inde- means knowledge concerning the external pendent conviction of the reality of the world, could suppose that knowledge of thing witnessed to, we are certain that it God would be vouchsafed through any does. Natural science only needs a rec-other channel. He who feels in the presognition of its partial character to be ence of a fellow-man that expansion and flooded with testimony to something be- elevation of the whole being which is the yond itself. But to demand this testimony result of reverence for what is above us, while it is regarded as the whole of knowl-possesses, we believe, the germ of an effecedge, is to demand that fertile soil shall it- tive refutation of a theory which must self produce seed. It is not science which graduate this ennobling influence in inverse opposes faith, it is the philosophy which is proportion to all else that is excellent, and based on science. The mind formed by at last leave the summits of humanity the study of things outward, is accustomed wholly devoid of the glow that fills its valto a kind of proof which, in the domain of leys. The loftiest of men, assuredly, are the spirit, will always be sought for in not cut off from that which raises the lowvain. That array of convergent certainties est. Genius and heroism do not shut men which makes up the evidence of the world of sense, and which, in a world domineered over by the truths of sense, has come to out from any share in that blessing which they enabled their gifted ones to bestow on all around them; nor does the attain the sort of effort required at one stage of life is quite unlike that which we have to make at another; and these changes would alone suffice to secure us against stagnation. ment of a high standard in goodness | valley through which all must pass-such diminish the scope of veneration. These is the course which to the imagination are certainties to some minds, as the per- most lives seem to pursue. At any rate, ceptions of sense are certainties; they are the statements into which we condense experience far less questionable than that on which any physical theory is founded. But they cannot, like lesser certainties, be transferred from one mind to another. They are, we believe, as the lesser certainties are not, inseparable from the experience which gives rises to them. And there are reasons peculiar to our own day which tend to shrivel up the faculty of veneration, and leave sympathy, affection, and pity, the only links by which man is bound to man. So rich may be the moral world thus left, that men forget how greatly it is impoverished. From The Saturday Review. oppor There is in most people's minds such a prejudice in favor of youth that they scarcely recognize the amount of toil which is imposed upon the young at every step by want of familiarity with their tools and their materials. We refer of course to the considerable majority who do bear the yoke in their youth; not to those whose only business up to the beginning of middle age is to give free play to the instinctive arts of pleasing themselves and others, in which some young people display a proficiency as surprising as that of the half-hatched chick in picking up corn. Less spontaneous natures may be only beginning to master the same arts as the occasion for practising them passes finally So deep lies the love of variety in our away. All those who are called to the nature that few people do not, in the long more truly human tasks which involve run, find it more fatiguing to keep entirely thought and struggle must have the upon level ground than to take hill and tunity of observing, as life goes on, how dale, rough and smooth, as they come. If strangely the burden of toil seems to shift the actual force spent in occasional climb- its place. What strange, blundering strug ing is greater than is required for level gles it used to cost us to accomplish things walking, it is more healthily distributed which now we do almost unconsciously; among the different muscles, and the ex- how much more exhausting often was the hilaration of perpetual change more than bewilderment of groping our way and compensates for the mere physical effort. beating the air than the effort by which, There is a somewhat similar advantage in later in life, we produce much more tangithe fact that the figurative journey of life ble results? It would often be an encourseldom remains long at one level. All agement to the young if it were but possiwork has its times of toiling ascent and of ble to explain to them how necessary a easy downward sliding. Life itself gener- foundation for future usefulness they may ally begins with a stiff climb, and ends with be laying while they seem to themselves to less of active effort and more rapid prog- be merely finding themselves out in one ress. Or, from another point of view, we mistake after another. If we reckoned the may compare youth to a rush down towards value of our work by its immediate results, the plains, from which, later in life, we most of the labor spent in youth would go hope gradually to rise to the serene for very little. Its chief effect is to pile up heights of experience. There is a de- mounds of failures, over which we may lightful adaptability about the up and down climb to a vantage-ground for future activhill metaphor; it runs equally well back-ity. Happily this upward struggle has its wards and forwards. But, on the whole, own exhilarating sense of infinite possibilithe most natural use of it is that which ties ahead which enables us to make light treats the morning's journey as uphill of toil and of failure. In a later phase we work; and typifies the absence of conscious effort, the quick flight of time, and the sense of gradual closing in and loss of vantage ground which creeps over us with advancing years, by the one word "downwards." Down from the level table-land upon which middle age takes its stand and does it work, down into the gathering shades of evening, down towards the become chary of uncertain effort, and, while every stroke begins to tell, we also begin to think twice before striking. On the level tablelands of middle life we can calculate precisely how much effect we shall produce; we are no longer liable to lose our footing and roll down the slope after the ludicrous and exasperating fashion of our youth; but neither have we any |