MIRACLES AND SPECIAL PRO V1DENCES. 365 
culations true to the second. We determine the dates of 
those that have occurred in the early times of history, and 
find calculation and history in harmony. Anomalies and 
perturbations in the planets have been over and over again 
observer!; but these, instead of demonstrating any incon- 
stancy on the part of natural law, have invariably been 
reduced to consequences of that law. Instead of referring 
the perturbations of Uranus to any interference on the 
part of the Author of nature with the law of gravitation, 
the question which the astronomer proposed to himself 
wa-s, " How, in accordance with this law, can the pertur- 
bation be produced?" Guided by a principle, he was en- 
abled to fix the point of space in which, if a mass of mat- 
ter were placed, the observed perturbations would follow. 
We know the result. The practical astronomer turned his 
telescope toward the region which the intellect of the 
theoretic astronomer had already explored, and the planet 
now named Neptune was found in its predicted place. A 
very respectable outcome, it will be admitted, of an impulse 
which " rests upon uo rational grounds, and can be traced 
to no rational principle;" which possesses " no intellectual 
character;" which " philosophy " has uprooted from " the 
ground of reason," and fixed in that " large irrational de- 
partment " discovered for it, by Mr. Mozley, in the hitherto 
unexplored wilderness of the human mind. 
The proper function of the inductive principle, or the 
belief in the order of nature, says Mr. Mozley, is " to act 
as a practical basis for the affairs of life, and the carrying 
on of human society." But what, it may be asked, has 
the planet Neptune, or the belts of Jupiter, or the white- 
ness about the poles of Mars, to do with the affairs of 
society? How is society affected by the fact that the sun's 
atmosphere contains sodium, or that the nebula of Orion 
contains hydrogen gas? Nineteen-twentieths of the force 
employed in the exercise of trie inductive principle, which, 
reiterates Mr. Mozley, is " purely practical," have been 
expended upon subjects as unpractical as these. What 
practical interest has society in the fact that the spots on 
the sun have a decennial period, and that when a magnet 
is closely watched for half a century, it is found to perform 
small motions which synchronize with the appearance and 
disappearance of the solar spots? And yet, I doubt not, 
Sir Edward Sabiue would deem a life of intellectual toil 
