PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. xlix 



nomenon as that now, yet, forgetting their own rule, they argue for 

 it. No doubt, Professor Sedgwick rightly calculates the nature of 

 his audience. 



In one section of his preface, Professor Sedgwick discusses what 

 he calls our " adopted philosophy," describing under this term the 

 system of materialism in its grossest form, and raving against its 

 professors with the virulence of a religious fanatic of the lowest school. 

 We repudiate, as heartily as himself, this philosophy, and deny his 

 ability to prove that our propositions, more than any others in science, 

 necessarily lead to any such system of belief. 



He then describes his own creed. The material world is manifestly 

 conducted under a system of unvarying order. " Orderly movements 

 and combinations in the animal world imply some corresponding 

 laws, but different laws from those out of which spring the movements 

 of dead and inorganic matter." Man is " governed by new laws ;" 

 " in his moral and intellectual attributes, he is widely separated from 

 all other parts of the living world, and far above them." Thus " not 

 one law, but many laws ;" yet " all implying a unity of will in the 

 great central and sustaining Power of the universe: and we thus 

 ascend to a conception of one great Intelligent Cause, ruling over all 

 nature, dead, sensitive, moral, and intellectual." 



In the present work, it has constantly been maintained that the 

 laws of nature appear as the expressions of a Will external to the 

 world, leading us to the conception of a divine originator and ruler 

 of all things. 



The material and chemical laws are largely concerned in even the 

 human constitution. Admitting, however, that there is a different 

 law presiding over our moral nature, it is still a law. It still fixes 

 thought and feeling as a department of nature, taking them wholly 

 out of the region of the miraculous. God has appointed an order for 

 the action of our intellectual and moral being, as another has been 

 appointed for the arrangements and movements of the planetary 

 bodies, and so on. Mr. Sedgwick himself makes at another place the 

 full admission that " the mind and morals of man are under the 

 regulation of fixed laws." Where, then, is the difference between 

 us ? Evidently in some perverse inference which he persists in making 

 as a necessary deduction from our hypothesis, but with which it is 

 no more justly chargeable than are his own views, or any other pro- 

 position of modern science. Some illustrations of this weakness in 

 the logical power presently appear. 



We find him going on to attempt, for the end which he has in view, 

 the establishment of a difference between the material and moral 

 laws. The former, he says, give certainties ; the latter only proba- 

 bilities. " The effects of a moral law admit of palliation or change, 

 aggravation or diminution : not so can we change a material or 

 mechanical law." " I afiirm, then, that the moral conduct of man 

 (whatsoever it may be in the eye of God) is not, like the movements 

 of the heavenly bodies, bound up in the conception of a constant, 

 undeviating law." 



