SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 155 



The most advanced science of our time does not regard life as a spe- 

 cial and separate principle, a real entity which has been added to mat- 

 ter, but as a mode in which certain physical forces manifest themselves, 

 just as heat is not a thing of itself, but a mode of motion. 



" Mechanical, chemical, and physical forces are the only efficient 

 agents in the living organism," at least the only ones which science 

 can recognize, and these forces are the same in both the organic and 

 the inorganic worlds. 



Behold a fire, a conflagration ; see it leap and climb, witness its 

 fierce activity, its all-devouring energies !. How like a thing of life it 

 is ! Is there a unique and original principle at work here, the prin- 

 ciple or spirit of fire, a thing apart from the intense chemical activity 

 which it occasions ? The ancient observers believed so, and it is a 

 pretty fancy, but science recognizes in it only another of the protean 

 forms in which force clothes itself. We can evoke fire without the 

 aid of fire, but the fire called life man has not yet been able so to 

 evoke — probably never will be able. The nearest he has as yet come 

 to it is in producing many of the organic compounds synthetically 

 from inorganic compounds — a triumph a few years ago thought to be 

 impossible. 



The barrier, then, between the organic and the inorganic, upon which 

 the scheme of theology of Professor Drummond turns, is by no means 

 a fixed conclusion of science. Science believes that the potencies or 

 properties of life are on the inorganic side, and that the passage has 

 actually taken place in the past or may still take place in the present. 



In working out his general thesis, our author takes courage from the 

 example of Walter Bagehot, whose physical politic, he says, is but the 

 extension of natural law to the political world ; and from the example 

 of Herbert Spencer, whose biological sociology is but the application 

 of natural law to the social world. But the political world of Walter 

 Bagehot and the social world of Herbert Spencer are worlds which 

 science recognizes ; they fall within its pale ; their existence is never 

 disputed. But the spiritual world of Professor Drummond is a world 

 of which science can know nothing. It is to science just as fanciful 

 or unreal as the spiritual world of Grecian or Scandinavian mythology, 

 or as the fairy world of childhood. 



It is true the world of art, the world of genius, the world of liter- 

 ature, is a very select and limited affair too ; but does anybody ever 

 call the reality of it in question ? Do we want proof that Shakespeare 

 and Milton are poets? But science does want proof, if the matter 

 comes to that, that the typical Puritan has the favor of any spiritual 

 powers not known to the rest of mankind — not known and equally 

 accessible to Zeno, or Plutarch, or Virgil, or Marcus Aurelius. 



It is just these exceptions, these departures from the established 

 course of Nature, that the natural philosopher is skeptical about. If an 

 obscure event, which happened in Judea over eighteen hundred years 



