114 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



experience and a mental balancing of the probability of 

 future experience, he will be in no danger of contrasting 

 the " mechanical explanation " of science with the " intel- 

 lectual description " of mythology. 



Some years ago (1885) the late Mr. Gladstone wrote a 

 remarkable article in The Nineteenth Century in which he 

 inveighed against the " dead mechanism " to which he 

 asserted men of science reduced the universe. He con- 

 trasted the mecJianical with the intellectual, and bravely set 

 what he termed the "majestic process of creation" described 

 in the first chapter of Genesis against the Darwinian 

 theory of evolution. He afterwards repeated several of 

 his arguments in a more elaborate work.^ Now, if men 

 even of ability can state paradoxes of this kind, we may 

 be fairly certain that their error arises from some wide- 

 spread confusion in the use of terms, and it befits us to 

 inquire how popular and scientific usage differ as to the 

 word viecJianical. Unfortunately, some more or less 

 superficial works on natural science give currency to the 

 notion that mechanics supply a code of rules which nature 

 of inherent necessity obeys. We are told in books pub- 

 lished even within the last few years that mechanics is the 

 science of force, that force is the cause which produces or 

 tends to produce change of motion, and that force is 

 inherent in matter. Force thus appears to the popular 

 mind as an agent inherent in unconscious matter producing 

 change. This agent is very naturally contrasted with the 

 will of a living being, the consciousness of a capacity to 

 produce motion. In matter this consciousness cannot be 

 inferred, and thus force is contrasted as a "dead" agent 

 with will as a " living " agent. The mind which has not 

 probed behind the unphilosophical axioms and definitions 

 of current physical text-books sympathises with Mr. 

 Gladstone's revolt against the " dead mechanism " to 

 which, in the imagination of both, science reduces the 

 universe. Now " matter " is for us a group of sense- 

 impressions and " matter in motion " is a sequence of 

 sense-impressions. Hence that which causes change of 



1 The hnpregnable Rock of Holy Scripture. London, 1890. 



