THE RELATIONS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES. 169 



When we have attained to this conception of hylozoism, of a living 

 material universe, the mystery of Nature is solved. The cosmos is 

 not, as some would have it, a vast machine wound up and set in 

 motion with the certainty that it will run down like a clock, and arrive 

 at a period of stagnation and death. The modern theory of thermody- 

 namic, though perhaps true within its limitations, has not yet grasped 

 the problem of the universe. The force that originated and impelled 

 sustains, and is the Divine Spirit which 



"Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 

 Spreads undivided, operates uuspent." 



The law of birth, growth, and decay, of endless change and per- 

 petual renewal, is everywhere seen working throughout the cosmos, 

 in nebula, in world and in sun, as in rock, in herb, and in man ; all of 

 which are but passing phases in the endless circulation of the universe, 

 in that perpetual new birth which we call Nature. This, it will be 

 said, is the poet's view of the external world, but it is at the same 

 time the one which seems to me to be forced upon us as the highest 

 generalization of modern science. 



The study of nature in its details presents itself to the mind in a 

 twofold aspect as historical and as philosophical. The first of these 

 gives rise to a General Physiography or description of nature, which 

 we commonly call Natural History as applied to each of the three 

 great divisions designated as the mineral, vegetable, and animal king- 

 doms. This physiographic method of study in the latter two gives us 

 systematic and descriptive botany and zoology, with their classifica- 

 tion and their terminology ; while the physiography of the mineral 

 kingdom includes not only systematic and descriptive mineralogy as 

 generally understood, but those branches of geology which we desig- 

 nate as petrography and geognosy, or the study of the constituents of 

 the earth's crust, of their aggregation and their distribution. 



terpreter, Davidson, " the ultimate atoms of matter are animate ; each atom having 

 united with it, and forming its unity or atomicity, a sensitive principle. When atoms 

 chemically combine, their sensitive principles become one. . . . The unit of natural exist- 

 ence is neither force nor matter, but sentience, and through this all the material and dy- 

 namic phenomena of nature may be explained." From the unifications of these sensitive 

 principles, or elementary souls, which take place in the combinations of matter, higher 

 and higher manifestations of sentience appear, constituting the various activities dis- 

 played in crystals, in plants, and in animals. From these elementary souls organic souls 

 are built up, and " when these are redissolved into the elementary ones through the dis- 

 solution of the organized bodies, the existence of the souls does not cease, but is merely 

 transformed." ^ (See " The Philosophical System of Rosmini," by Thomas Davidson, pp. 

 284-301.) This volume was unpublished, and these views of Rosmini were unknown to 

 me, at the time of writing the above pages. 



The eminent biophysiologist, William B. Carpenter, in an essay on " Life," published 

 in 1S4Y, contends that organization and biotical functions arise from the natural operation 

 of forces inherent in elemental matter. (Todd's " Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiol- 

 ogy," vol. iii, p. 151.) 



