840 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



is taken from the old interpretation is added to the new. Or 

 rather, we may say that transference from the one to the 

 other is accompanied by increase ; since, for an explanation 

 which has a seeming feasibility, science substitutes an ex 

 planation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, 

 there leaves us in presence of the avowedly inexplicable. 



Under one of its aspects scientific progress is a gradual 

 transfiguration of Nature. Where ordinary perception saw 

 perfect simplicity it reveals great complexity; where there 

 seemed absolute inertness it discloses intense activity ; and 

 in what appears mere vacancy it finds a marvellous play of 

 forces. Each generation of physicists discovers in so-called 

 &quot; brute matter,&quot; powers which but a few years before, the 

 most instructed physicists would have thought incredible; 

 as instance the ability of a mere iron plate to take up the 

 complicated aerial vibrations produced by articulate speech, 

 which, translated into multitudinous and varied electric 

 pulses, are re-translated a thousand miles off by another iron 

 plate and again heard as articulate speech. When the 

 explorer of Nature sees that quiescent as they appear, sur 

 rounding solid bodies are thus sensitive to forces which are 

 infinitesimal in their amounts when the spectroscope proves 

 to him that molecules on the Earth pulsate in harmony with 

 molecules in the stars when there is forced on him the 

 inference that every point in space thrills with an infinity of 

 vibrations passing through it in all directions ; the conception 

 to which he tends is much less that of a Universe of dead 

 matter than that of a Universe everywhere alive : alive if not 

 in the restricted sense, still in a general sense. 



This transfiguration which the inquiries of physicists con 

 tinually increase, is aided by that other transfiguration result 

 ing from metaphysical inquiries. Subjective analysis compels 

 us to admit that our scientific interpretations of the pheno 

 mena which objects present, are expressed in terms of our 

 own variously-combined sensations and ideas are expressed, 

 that is, in elements belonging to consciousness, which are but 



