428 THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 



when the tender mechanism of the brain will be traced 

 out, and every thought reduced to the expenditure of a 

 determinate weight of nitrogen and phosphorus. No 

 apparent limit exists to the success of scientific method 

 in weighing and measuring, and reducing beneath the ! 

 sway of law, the phenomena both of matter and of mind. 

 And if mental phenomena be thus capable of treatment by 

 the balance and the micrometer, can we any longer hold 

 that mind is distinct from matter \ Must not the same 

 inexorable reign of law, which is apparent in the motions 

 of brute matter, be extended to the most subtle feelings 

 of the human heart \ Are not plants and animals and 

 ultimately man himself, merely crystals, as it were, of a 

 complicated form 1 If so, our boasted Free Will becomes 

 a delusion, Moral Responsibility a fiction, Spirit a mere 

 name for the more curious manifestations of material 

 energy. All that happens, whether right or wrong, plea 

 surable or painful, is but the outcome of the necessary 

 relations of time and space and force, and of the laws of 

 matter emerging from them, which are fixed in the very 

 nature of things. 



Materialism seems, then, to be the coming religion, and 

 resignation to the nonenity of human will the only duty. 

 Such may not generally be the reflections of men of 

 science, but I believe that we may thus describe the 

 secret feelings of fear which the constant advance of 



o 



scientific investigation excites in the minds of many who 

 view it from a distance. Is science, then, essentially 

 atheistic and materialistic in its tendency \ Does the 

 uniform action of material causes, which we learn with 

 an ever increasing approach to certainty, preclude the 

 hypothesis of an intelligent and benevolent Creator, who 

 has not only designed the existing universe, but who 

 still retains the power to alter its course from time 

 to time \ 



