SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 439 



tic troubles, and financial cares, or his industry had been just a little 

 less tenacious, he would have failed in the prodigious calculations 

 which led him to his brilliant discoveries, and gave science such a 

 great propulsion. Just five years after the publication of Kepler's 

 " New Astronomy " the Laird of Merchison published, in Scotland, 

 his " JSIirifici Logarithmoruni Canonis Descriptio.'^'' If Kepler had 

 only had Napier's logarithms ! But succeeding students have enjoyed 

 this wonderful instrumental aid, and done great mental work Avith less 

 draufjht on their vital energies. 



The very facts, then, which make us proud of modern science 

 should make scientific men very humble. It will be noticed that the 

 most arrogant cultivators of science are those who are most ready to 

 assail such religious men as are rigid, and hold that nothing can be 

 added to or taken away from theology ; and such scientific men make 

 this assault on the assumption that physical sciences are fixed, cer- 

 tain, and exact. How ridiculous they make themselves, a review of 

 the history of any science for the last fifty years would show. Is 

 there any department of physical science in which a text-book used a 

 quarter of a century ago would now be put into the hands of any stu- 

 dent ? The fact is that any man, who is careful of his reputation, has 

 some trepidation in issuing a volume on science, lest the day his pub- 

 lishers announce his book the morning papers announce, also, a dis- 

 covery which knocks the bottom out of all his arguments. This 

 shows the great intellectual activity of the age a matter to rejoice 

 in, but it should also promote humility, and rejjress egotism in all 

 well-ordered minds. There is, probably, no one thing known in its 

 properties and accidents, in its relations to all abstract truths and 

 concrete existence. No one thing is exactly and thoroughly known 

 by any man, or by all men. Mr. Herbert Spencer well says : " Much 

 of what we call science is not exact, and some of it, as physiology, 

 can never become exact" ("Recent Discussions," p. 158). He might 

 have made the remark with greater width, and no less truth, since 

 every day accumulates proof that that department of our knowledge 

 which we call the exact sciences holds an increasingly small propor- 

 tion to the whole domain of science. 



There is one important truth which seems often ignored, and which 

 should frequently be brought to our attention, viz., that the proposi- 

 tions which embody our science are statements not of absolute truths, 

 but of probabilities. Probabilities differ. There is that which is 

 merely probable, and that which is more probable, and that which is 

 still much more probable, and that which is so probable that our 

 faculties cannot distinguish between this probability and absolute cer- 

 tainty ; and so we act on it as if it were certain. But it is still only 

 a "probability," and not a " certainty." It seems as though it would 

 forever be impossible for us to determine how near a probability can 

 approach a certainty without becoming identical with that certainty. 



