Darwinism Verified. 5 



parcel of science, and yet men remain as firm 

 theists as ever. The objection is, therefore, evi 

 dently fallacious, and the fallacy is not difficult 

 to point out. It lies in a metaphysical miscon 

 ception of the words &quot; force &quot; and &quot; cause.&quot; 

 &quot; Force &quot; is implicitly regarded as a sort of en 

 tity or daemon which has a mode of action distin 

 guishable from that of universal Deity ; other 

 wise it is meaningless to speak of substituting the 

 one for the other. But such a personification of 

 &quot; force &quot; is a remnant of barbaric thought, and is 

 in no wise sanctioned by physical science. When 

 astronomy speaks of two planets as attracting 

 each other with a &quot; force &quot; which varies directly 

 as their masses and inversely as the squares of 

 their distances apart, it simply uses the phrase 

 as a convenient metaphor by which to describe 

 the manner in which the observed movements of 

 the two bodies occur. It explains that in pres 

 ence of each other the two bodies are observed to 

 change their positions in a certain specified way, 

 and this is all that it means. This is all that a 

 strictly scientific hypothesis can possibly allege, 

 and this is all that observation can possibly prove. 

 Whatever goes beyond this, and imagines or as 

 serts a kind of &quot; pull &quot; between the two bodies, 

 is not science, but metaphysics. An atheistic 



