PRESIDENT NEWCOMB. 13 



by forms over which we have no control, and able to penetrate so 

 little into the surrounding darkness, that we cannot tell what shall 

 happen to us on the morrow. It has, in all ages, peopled the 

 thickets with invisible beings having an interest in our welfare or 

 our injury, or with providential interferences designed to compass 

 ends of which we, in advance, have no conception. Its teachings 

 are nearest and most welcome in times of affliction and fear. Its 

 objections to the teachings of the other school, are heard far and 

 wide through the land. Notwithstanding the number of forms 

 which these objections take, their essence may be condensed into a 

 very few sentences. The following will probably be accepted as 

 a fair rendering of their substance. 



You take a contracted and unphilosophical view of nature when 

 you say that the world is governed by inexorable laws. These 

 laws are not governors, but only the instruments of government 

 by which the real governor executes his purposes. With them, 

 but without subverting or violating them, he can reward or punish, 

 bring on prosperity or call down disaster, according to the dictates 

 of his sovereign will. The child and the peasant call the thunder 

 the voice of God. The modern philosopher attempts to correct 

 them by showing that it is the product of evaporation and of 

 atmospheric electricity. But the view of the child is really the 

 more correct of the two, because he ascends at .once to the first 

 cause, and thus sees further than the philosopher who corrects him 

 because the latter stops short at the immediate or secondary cause 

 without even trying to raise his eyes to the higher source of power. 

 I think I am not far wrong in giving this as the substance of the 

 most cogent objections which may be anticipated in any quarter 

 against the mechanical theory of the course of nature. 



Now, if these views referred only to inscrutable first causes of 

 things, or to the intelligent but invisible substratum which under- 

 lies the whole cause of nature, we should have no occasion to 

 discuss them, because they would lie outside the field I have 

 assigned as that of our contemplation at the present time, and 

 which I have sought to describe as the field of phenomena. The 

 doctrines that all things go on in exact accordance with the will of 

 the Creator ; that he has certain ends which the laws of nature are 

 designed to bring about ; and that an intelligent cause lies behind 

 the whole universe of phenomena, are of a class which science has 

 no occasion whatever to dispute. If it were made clearly to appear 



