32 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. 



lasted ; invisible, only in so far as the ultimate connec- 

 tion between the will to do and the thing which does 

 is invisible ; imperishable, only in so far as life as a 

 whole is imperishable ; omniscient and omnipotent, 

 within the limits only of a very long and large expe- 

 rience, but ignorant and impotent in respect of all else 

 limited in all the above respects, yet even so in- 

 calculably vaster than anything that we can conceive? 



Or shall we see God as we were taught to say we 

 saw him when we were children as an artificial and 

 violent attempt to combine ideas which fly asunder and 

 asunder, no matter how often we try to force them into 

 combination ? 



" The true mainspring of our existence," says Buffon, 

 " lies not in those muscles, veins, arteries, and nerves, 

 which have been described with so much minuteness, 

 it is to be found in the more hidden forces which are 

 not bounden by the gross mechanical laws which we 

 would fain set over them. Instead of trying to know 

 these forces by their effects, we have endeavoured to up- 

 root even their very idea, so as to banish them utterly 

 from philosophy. But they return to us and with 

 renewed vigour ; they return to us in gravitation, in 

 chemical affinity, in the phenomena of electricity, &c. 

 Their existence rests upon the clearest evidence ; the 

 omnipresence of their action is indisputable, but 

 that action is hidden away from our eyes, and is a 

 matter of inference only ; we cannot actually see them, 

 therefore we find difficulty in admitting that they 

 exist ; we wish to judge of everything by its exterior ; 

 we imagine that the exterior is the whole, and deeming 



