1875.] The Possibility of a Future Life. 475 
any meaning. Nor can we refrain from pointing out that 
events which seem to be departures from uniformity become 
rarer and rarer in the exact proportion as nations attain a 
higher culture, and as the facilities for recording occurrences 
become greater. 
Upon the do¢trine of the Conservation of Force and upon 
the Principle of Continuity there has been based a new and 
‘original attempt to prove modern science compatible with 
the teachings of Christianity. 
Reconciliation between Religion and Science, we may here 
ask—wherefore? What legitimate ground is there for a 
disagreement between them? Let us bring upas arbitrator 
not the much-talked-of ‘‘ intelligent foreigner,’”’ but that 
still more mythological being the inhabitant of another 
world,—if in virtue of recent interpretations of the Law of 
Continuity our passions are not now supposed to extend 
over the whole universe.* Let us ask him as touching this 
supposed need of a reconciliation. Might he not well reply 
that Religion and Science address themselves respectively 
to different phases of man’s nature; that their ends and 
their functions are widely distinct, neither being able to 
supply the place of the other ;—that even when regarding 
the same object or fact, they view it from different aspects.t 
Might he not tell us that in his interstellar wanderings he 
had met with a race equal or superior to ourselves intellec- 
tually and mighty in science, yet devoid of those emotions 
and passions which make up the main tissue of normal 
human life and to which Religion addresses itself? Might 
he not remind us that in the person of Henry Cavendish our 
own species had produced at least an approximate instance 
of such a being? On the other hand, he might describe to 
us creatures far inferior to man in intellect and incapable of 
that systematised interpretation of the universe which we 
call science and yet filled with an intenser moral life. We 
* See Sir D. BREWSTER’S “‘ Plurality of Worlds,” passim. The same author 
in his inaugural address as President of the British Association in 1850 said : 
—‘‘If men of ordinary capacity possessed that knowledge which is within 
their reach and had that faith in science (?) which its truths inspire, they would 
see in every planet around them, and in every star above them, the home of 
immortal natures, of beings that suffer and of beings that rejoice, of souls that 
are saved and of souls that are lost!” 
t+ “The golden side of Heaven’s great shield is faith; the silver, reason.” — 
BaILEy’s ‘“ Festus.” 
t It will be understood that the term ‘‘ moral” is not here used in antithesis 
to “immoral,” which it in this sense includes, but in contra-distin@tion to 
‘“‘ physical” and to ‘‘intelle@tual.” It is well known that the religious world 
are generally more lenient to the man of strong, though ill-regulated, passions, 
than to one like Cavendish, whose moral nature is, so to speak, atrophied, and 
