7g 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the conditions on which weight is attached to evidence. The imagi- 

 nation which supposes that it does, simply does not "assume the air of 

 scientific reason." 



I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down 

 by science, disorder is unimaginable. If a being endowed with perfect 

 intellectual and a-sthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for 

 suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost 

 powers to the investigation of Nature, the universe would seem to him 

 to be a sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of 

 time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry 

 would present itself; and each of them would show itself to be the 

 logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the condi- 

 tions which we call the laws of Nature. Such a spectator might well 

 be filled with that Amor intelleetualls Dei (intellectual love of God), 

 the beatific vision of the vita contemplative!, (contemplative life), which 

 some of the greatest thinkers of all ages, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, 

 have regarded as the only conceivable eternal felicity ; and the vision 

 of illimitable suffering, as if sensitive beings were unregarded animal- 

 cules which had got between the bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, 

 which mars the prospect to us poor mortals, in no wise alters the fact 

 that order is lord of all, and disorder only a name for that part of the 

 order which gives us pain. 



The other fallacious employment of the names of scientific concep- 

 tions which pervades the preacher's utterance, brings me back to the 

 proper topic of the present paper. It is the use of the word " law " as 

 if it denoted a thing — as if a "law of Nature," as Science understands 

 it, were a being endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which the 

 phenomena expressed by that law are brought about. The preacher 

 asks, " Might not there be a suspension of a lower law by the interven- 

 tion of a higher ? " He tells us that every time we lift our arms we 

 defy the law of gravitation. He asks whether some day certain "royal 

 and ultimate laws " may not come and " wreck " those laws which are 

 at present, it would appear, acting as Nature's police. It is evident, 

 from these expressions, that " laws," in the mind of the preacher, are 

 entities having an objective existence in a graduated hierarchy. And 

 it would appear that the " royal laws " are by no means to be regarded 

 as constitutional royalties : at any moment, they may, like Eastern 

 despots, descend in wrath among the middle-class and plebeian laws, 

 which have hitherto done the drudgery of the world's work, and — to 

 use phraseology not unknown in our seats of learning — "make hay" 

 of their belongings. Or perhaps a still more familiar analogy has sug- 

 gested this singular theory ; and it is thought that high laws may 

 "suspend" low laws, as a bishop may suspend a curate. 



Far be it from me to controvert these views, if any one likes to 

 hold them. All I wish to remark is that such a conception of the 

 nature of " laws " has nothing to do with modern science. It is scho- 



