PRESIDENT NEWCOMB. 25 



moisture it shall have in any given place, a day, a month or a j r ear 

 from the present time, is as completely fixed by the present state 

 of things and by the laws of evaporation condensation and motion 

 of gasses as are the position of the heavenly bodies. The first 

 deposition of frost will be determined by forces now at play, and 

 any deviation from the inevitable action would be a miracle of the 

 same kind as pieces of timber hewing themselves into shape and 

 putting themselves together untouched by man. Please notice 

 that this similarity between the two states of things is entirely 

 independent of any philosophical theor} 7 of natural causes. All 

 we claim is that the laws which determine the motion of the air, the 

 formation of clouds, the fall of rain and the deposition of frost, 

 are, with respect to their certainty of action, of the same class 

 with those which determine the position, the movements, and the 

 cohesion of a stick of timber. If you claim that both classes of 

 causes are the acts of the Creator, we have nothing to say against 

 it. All we say is that you must interpret his acts in the same way in 

 the two cases. You must not claim that He will produce heat or 

 cold by a fiat of an arbitrary will, unless you also claim that He 

 will build the hospital or leave it unbuilt, according to a similar 

 fiat. Nor is it of any avail to say that you know it to be His will 

 that the hospital shall remain unbuilt unless man undertakes it. 

 We can in reply maintain that \\e know it to be His will that the 

 course of nature shall go on unchanged, no matter how it may 

 effect human interests. 



It thus appears that the dividing line between mechanical and 

 final causes, as drawn by the human mind in all ages, has not been 

 fixed by any absolute criterion, but only .near the limits of the 

 knowledge possessed by* each generation. Science has extended 

 the line entirely beyond ordinary mental vision, not by introducing 

 any new theory of nature, but by extending the boundaries of 

 exact knowledge, and with them, of the field in which, by com- 

 mon consent, final causes do not admit of being traced. The 

 telescope has revealed to us a universe compared with which that 

 known to ancients is but an atom, and geology has opened up 

 to our view a vista of ages in which the lifetime of our generation 

 is hardly more than a moment. And thus final causes have taken 

 their flight from a vast region in which they before lay hid in ob- 

 scurity. You may now ask, have they simply taken refuge in 



