20 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ally existing Deity. That one, for instance, which has had the most nu- 

 merous and by no means the least intelligent following of any on earth, 

 teaches that the Divinity in his highest perfection is wrapped away from 

 the world in a state of profound and eternal sleep, which really does not 

 differ from non-existence, whether it be called by that name or not. No 

 candid mind who has followed the writings of M. Vacherot can well deny 

 that his religion is as earnest as can be. He worships the Perfect, the 

 Supreme Ideal ; but he conceives that the very notion of the Ideal is re- 

 pugnant to its real existence. In fact, M. Vacherot finds it agreeable to 

 his reason to assert that non-existence is an essential character of the 

 perfect, just as St. Anselm and Descartes found it agreeable to theirs 

 to assert the extreme opposite. I confess that there is one respect in 

 which either of these positions seems to me more congruous with the 

 religious attitude than that of a theology which stands upon evidences ; 

 for as soon as the Deity presents himself to either Anselm or Vacherot, 

 and manifests his glorious attributes, whether it be in a vision of the 

 night or day, either of them recognizes his adorable God, and sinks 

 upon his knee's at once ; whereas the theologian of evidences will first 

 demand that the divine apparition shall identify himself, and only after 

 having scrutinized his credentials and weighed the probabilities of his 

 being found among the totality of existences, will he finally render his 

 circumspect homage, thinking that no characters can be adorable but 

 those which belong to a real thing. 



If we could find out any general characteristic of the universe, any 

 mannerism in the ways of Nature, any law everywhere applicable and 

 universally valid, such a discovery would be of such singular assistance 

 to us in all our future reasoning, that it would deserve a place almost 

 at the head of the principles of logic. On the other hand, if it can be 

 shown that there is nothing of the sort to find out, but that every dis- 

 coverable regularity is of limited range, this again will be of logical 

 importance. What sort of a conception we ought to have of the uni- 

 verse, how to think of the ensemble of things, is a fundamental problem 

 in the theory of reasoning. 



II. 



It is the legitimate endeavor of scientific men now, as it was twen- 

 ty-three hundred years ago, to account for the formation of the solar 

 system and of the cluster of stars which forms the galaxy, by the for- 

 tuitous concourse of atoms. The greatest expounder of this theory, 

 when asked how he could write an immense book on the system of the 

 world without one mention of its author, replied, very logically, " Je 

 n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la." But, in truth, there is noth- 

 ing atheistical in the theory, any more than there was in this answer. 

 Matter is supposed to be composed of molecules which obey the laws 

 of mechanics and exert certain attractions upon one another ; and it is 

 to these regularities (which there is no attempt to account for) that 



