THE LAWS OF NATURE. 549 



an.swer to the question, 'What is a miracle?'' begins by reminding us 

 that the reply will depend yery much upon the intelligence of the 

 being who answers it. or whom the miracle is wrought for. 



••'To my h<»'st\ do I not work a miracle eyer}' time 1 open for him 

 an impassable turnpike ?" 



"■ ' But is not a real miracle simply a yiolation of the laws of nature? ' 

 ask seyeral. What are the laws of nature? ' Is it not the deepest law 

 of nature that she be constant?' cries the illuminated class. 'Is not 

 the machine of the uniyerse fixed to move by unalterable rules?' 



'•'"I believe that nature, that the universe, which no one whom it so 

 pleases can be prevented from calling a machine, does move by the 

 most unalterable rules. And now I make the old inquiry as to what 

 those same unalterable rules, forming the complete statute book of 

 nature, may possibly be? 



'""They stand written in our works of science,' say you; 'in the 

 accumulated records of man's experience.' Was man with his experi- 

 ence present at the creation, then, to see how it all went on? Have 

 any deepest scientific individuals yet dived down to the foundations of 

 the uniyerse and gauged everything there? Alas, these scientific 

 individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some 

 handl)readths deeper than we see into the deep that is infinite, without 

 bottom as without shore." 



"Philosophy complains that custom has hoodwinked us from the 

 first; that we do everything by custom, even believe b}" it; that our 

 very axioms, boast as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we 

 have never heard questioned. Innumerable are the illusions of custom, 

 V)ut of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us 

 that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous!" 



A lesson for us, as people who are most of us interested in science, 

 as to how little its most fixed conclusions may be worth, may perhaps 

 be conveyed in an example. A century and a half ago, when the new 

 science of chemistry won its first triumphs, the fundamental discovery 

 which was to illuminate the whole science, the settled acquisition 

 which it seemed to have brought to us, the thing which was going to 

 last, w^as 'phlogiston.' 



This had everything to recommend it in universal acceptance and in 

 what seemed to the foremost men of the time its absolute certaint}-. 



"If any opinion," says Priestley, "in all the modern doctrine con- 

 cerning air be well founded, it is certainly this, that nitrous air is 

 highly charged with phlogiston. If I have completely ascertained 

 anything at all relating to air, it is this." 



I am trying here to say that all laws of nature are little else than 

 man's hypotheses about nature. 



Phlogiston was then to the science of a former age, in this sense a law 



