NOTHING SMALL EST NATUEE. 617 



tioned in the last few paragraphs, therefore, do act in the 

 ways ascribed to them, though our hmited faculties are at present, 

 perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their immediate, still 

 more their ultimate, consequences. But our inabihty to assign 

 definite values to these causes of the disturbance of natural ar- 

 rangements is not a reason for ignoring the existence of such 

 causes in any general view of the relations between man and 

 nature, and we are never justified in assuming a force to be 

 insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even because no 

 physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin. The collec- 

 tion of phenomena must precede the analysis of them, and every 

 new fact, illustrative of the action and reaction between humanity 

 and the material world around it, is another step towards the 

 determination of the great question, whether man is of material 

 nature or above her. 



in such cases now elude human understanding, but who shall say that the 

 mathematics of the future may not compute the measure of such agency and 

 calculate even these small cosmical results of human action ? 



One of the sublimest, and at the same time most fearful suggestions that 

 have been prompted by the researches of modern science, was made by Babbage 

 in the ninth chapter of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. I have not the volume 

 at hand, but the following explanation wUl recall to the reader, if it does not 

 otlierwise make intelligible, the suggestion I refer to : 



No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temperature, 

 of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by attraction 

 or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. These again, 

 by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and the impulse thus 

 given extends through the whole material universe. Every human movement, 

 every organic act, every volition, passion or emotion, every intellectual process, 

 is accompanied with atomic disturbance, and hence every such movement, 

 every such act or process, affects all the atoms of universal matter. Though 

 action and reaction are equal, yet reaction does not restore disturbed atoms 

 to their former place and condition, and consequently the effects of the least 

 material change are never cancelled, but in some way perpetuated, so that no 

 action can take place in physical, moral or intellectual nature, without leav- 

 ing aU matter in a different state from what it would have been if such action 

 had not occurred. Hence, to use language which I have employed on another 

 occasion : there exists, not alone in the human conscience or in the omnis- 

 cience of the Creator, but in external nature, an ineffaceable, imperishable 

 record, possibly legible even to created intelligence, of every act done, every 

 word uttered, nay, of every wish and purpose and thought conceived by 

 mortal man, from the birth of our first parent to the final extinction of our 

 race ; so that the physical traces of our most secret sins shaU last until time 

 shall be merged in that eternity of which not science, but religion alone, 

 assumes to take cognizance. 



