" THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY." 811 



promise the profoundest tendency to revolt against the law of uniform 

 succession as too dull to he credible, and to exult in the occasional evi- 

 dence which the history of their time affords that "truth after all is 

 strano-er than fiction." Is not the early love of tales of marvel, and the 

 later love of tales of wild adventure and hair-breadth escapes, and again, 

 the deep pleasure which we all feel in that "poetic justice " which is so 

 rare in actual experience, a sufficient proof that men retain, even to the 

 last, a keen prepossession against the doctrine that laws of uniform an- 

 tecedency and consequence can be traced throughout the most inter- 

 esting phases of human life ? Even in the city, where so many hopes 

 are crushed every day, the " Bull " goes on believing in his own too 

 sanguine expectations, and the " Bear " in his own dismal predictions, 

 without correcting his own bias as experience should have led him to 

 correct it. I believe it will be found that nothing is more difficult 

 than to beat into the majority of minds the belief that there is such a 

 thing as a " law of Nature " at all. So far as I can judge, nine women 

 out of ten have never adequately realized what a law of Nature means, 

 nor is the proportion much smaller for men, unless they have been well 

 drilled in some department of physics. Of course, I heartily agree with 

 Dr. Ward that experience can not prove the uniformity of Nature, and 

 for this very good reason, among others, that it is impossible to say 

 what the uniformity of Nature means. We can not exhaust the number 

 of interfering causes which may break that uniformity. I at least can 

 not doubt that, so far as mind influences matter, there may be a vast 

 multitude of real disturbing causes introduced by mind to break 

 through those laws of uniformity in material things, of which at pres- 

 ent we know only the elements. But of this I am very sure, that at 

 present we are much apter to accept superficial and inadequate evidence 

 of the breach of laws of uniformity than we ought to be ; that educa- 

 tion does not do half enough to beat out of our minds that credulous 

 expectation that there is some disposition in the governing principles 

 of the universe, either to favor us or to persecute us, as the case 

 may be, which springs, not from experience, but from groundless 

 prejudice and prepossession ; and that much greater efforts should be 

 made to set before young people the true inexorability of Nature's 

 laws than is actually made at present. It is quite true that no man 

 can say positively either that the sun will rise to-morrow, or that an 

 iron bar will fall to the ground if the hand drops it. We do not abso- 

 lutely know that the sun may not blaze up and go out before to-mor- 

 row, as it is said that some stars of considerable magnitude have blazed 

 up and gone out. We do not know that there may not be some enor- 

 mously powerful and invisible magnet in the neighborhood which will 

 attract the iron bar upward with more force than that with which 

 the earth pulls it downward. But we do know that in millions and 

 billions of cases expectations founded on the same sort of evidence as 

 the expectation that the sun will rise to-morrow, and that the dropped 



