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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



As illustrating this, I might commence with 

 the age of image-worship, when the fate of the 

 individual is supposed to be at the mercy of cer- 

 tain spiritual entities, symbolized by forms of 

 wood, stone, or wax. But, leaving out of consid- 

 eration ideas so different from those which pre- 

 vail among us, let us come nearer home. It is 

 not many generations since men who knew that 

 the regular course of Nature went on in accord- 

 ance with mechanical laws believed, nevertheless, 

 that occurrences of a terrific or extraordinary 

 character were specially brought about to com- 

 pass some end of Providence. Not only so, but, 

 what is most essential to our theme, this end was 

 supposed to be a scrutable one. The motions of 

 stars and planets had gone on from age to age, 

 until no new aspect of them inspired alarm. But 

 a comet was looked upon as a messenger specially 

 sent to give warning of a coming calamity. The 

 scrutable end was, in this case, the warning of man- 

 kind. Ordinary cases of sickness and accident, 

 whatever their result, are always looked upon as 

 a part of the regular course of events. But it 

 is not many centuries since the pestilence was 

 believed to be specially sent by Heaven to pun- 

 ish mankind for their wickedness. Punishment 

 and terror were here the ends which Providence 

 was supposed to have in view. The regular 

 daily breezes and showers were supposed to be 

 the result of natural laws. But these laws were 

 not supposed to be entirely adequate to the pro- 

 duction of the tornado, which was again a spe- 

 cial messenger ; and they were suspended or 

 their action was modified in times of extreme 

 drought, threatening mankind with famine. 



These special messengers of Heaven have, one 

 by one, yoked themselves to the car of natural 

 law, so that I think I can hardly be wrong in say- 

 ing that the supremacy of mechanical law and 

 its adequacy to account for the whole course of 

 Nature, as we see it going on before us, is now 

 the almost universal opinion of educated men. 

 This revolution in human thought is, perhaps, 

 clearly brought out in the different view we now 

 take of certain religious observances introduced 

 by our ancestors, whose ideas would now be con- 

 sidered as approaching the irreverent. Take, for 

 example, the prayers for the right kind of weather 

 which we find in our prayer-books. When they 

 were first composed and inserted, their object 

 was a purely practical one. As the farmers now 

 sometimes fire off cannon to make the black 

 cloud break and discharge its contents upon the 

 parched field, so the prayers were to be offered up 

 in order that the aqueous vapor in the air might 



be made to condense and fall. That a much more 

 exalted view of prayer than this is now taken by 

 the more enlightened portion of the religious world 

 I think we have every reason to believe. 



Although we can hardly entertain a serious 

 doubt that the mechanical theory of natural oper- 

 ations, or, as it is sometimes* called, the doctrine 

 of the uniformity of Nature, is generally acqui- 

 esced in by the mature thought of intelligent 

 Christendom, yet objections are frequently made 

 to it, because it seems to run counter to some of our 

 most cherished ideas. If it were not paradoxical 

 to make the assertion, it might be said that we 

 hold, or at least express, entirely inconsistent 

 views on the subject. The fact is, that we are 

 pupils of two opposing schools, which are in a 

 certain sense antagonistic, one of which we can- 

 not and the other of which we will not give up. 

 In one of these schools the chief teachers are 

 observation and experience. All sentiment and 

 emotion are banished from its curriculum, which 

 admits only the hard realities of the outer 

 world. The older we grow the more we see and 

 hear of this school, and the more unreservedly 

 we accept its teachings. It tells us that the 

 whole course of Nature takes place in accord- 

 ance with certain laws, capable of expression in 

 mathematical language ; that these laws act with 

 more than an iron rigor and without any regard 

 to consequences ; that they are deaf to prayer or 

 entreaty, and know no such thing as sympathy or 

 remorse; that, if we would succeed, we must 

 study them, and so govern ourselves that their 

 action shall inure to our benefit. 



The other school is that of sympathy, emo- 

 tion, and religious faith. In it, as children, we 

 receive our first teachings. It shows us our- 

 selves placed, as it were, in a forest of mystery, 

 surrounded by forces over which we have no con- 

 trol, and able to penetrate so little into the sur- 

 rounding darkness that we cannot tell what shall 

 happen to us on the morrow. It has in all ages 

 peopled the thickets with invisible beings, having 

 an interest in our welfare or our injury, or with 

 providential interferences designed to compass 

 ends of which we in advance have no concep- 

 tion. Its teachings are nearest and most wel- 

 come in times of affliction and fear. Its objec- 

 tions to the teachings of the other school are 

 heard far and wide through the land. Notwith- 

 standing the number of forms which these objec- 

 tions take, their essence may be condensed into a 

 very few sentences. The following will probably 

 be accepted as a fair rendering of their substance : 



You take a contracted and unphilosophical 



