"THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY:' 809 



when I say " I believe in moral obligation," I use the word believe 

 just as I do when I say "I believe in the attestations of memory." 

 "God is not necessary only to my conception of morality. His exist- 

 ence is necessary to the existence of obligation." I know God by "a 

 combination of intuition and experience, which is Kant's condition of 

 knowledge. If there be a God, our imagination would present him 

 to us as inflicting pain on the violator of his law, and lo ! the imagi- 

 nation turns out to be an experienced fact. The Unknowable suddenly 

 stabs me to the heart." I believe in the uniformity of Nature only in 

 the sense in which I believe in every other high probability for in- 

 stance, only in the sense in which I believe that the sun will rise to- 

 morrow. I believe in God in the sense in which I believe in pain and 

 pleasure, in space and time, in right and wrong, in myself, in that which 

 curbs me, governs me, besets me behind and before, and lays its hand 

 upon me. The uniformity of Nature, though a very useful working hy- 

 pothesis, is, as Professor Huxley admits, unproved and unprovable as 

 a final truth of reason. But " if I do not know God, then I know 

 nothing whatsoever," for if " the pillared pavement is rottenness," 

 then surely also is "earth's base built on stubble." 



There was a certain perceptible reluctance to follow Father Dal- 

 gairns, which lasted some couple of minutes. Then we heard a deep- 

 toned, musical voice, which dwelt with slow emphasis on the most 

 important words of each sentence, and which gave a singular force 

 to the irony with which the speaker's expressions of belief were freely 

 mingled. It was Mr. Ruskin. "The question," he said, " Can experi- 

 ence prove the uniformity of Nature ? is, in my mind, so assuredly 

 answerable with the negative which the writer appeared to desire, 

 that precisely on that ground the performance of any so-called mira- 

 cles whatever would be really unimpressive to me. If a second 

 Joshua to-morrow commanded the sun to stand still, and it obeyed 

 him, and he therefore claimed deference as a miracle-worker, I am 

 afraid I should answer : ' What ! a miracle that the sun stands still ? 

 not at all. I was always expecting it would. The only wonder 

 to me was its going on.' But even assuming the demonstrable 

 uniformity of the laws or customs of Nature which are known 

 to us, it remains to me a difficult question what measure of 

 interference with such law or custom we might logically hold miracu- 

 lous, and what, on the contrary, we should treat only as proof of the 

 existence of some other law hitherto undiscovered. For instance, 

 there is a case authenticated by the signatures of several leading 

 physicians in Paris, in which a peasant-girl, under certain conditions 

 of morbid excitement, was able to move objects at some distance 

 from her without touching them. Taking the evidence for what it 

 may be worth, the discovery of such a faculty would only, I suppose, 

 justify us in concluding that some new vital energy was developing 

 itself under the conditions of modern life, and not that any interfer- 



