198 POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES vi 



the insect than it has in giving a man some of the 

 attributes of a bird and making an angel of him ; 

 or in ascribing to him the ascensive tendencies of 

 a balloon, as the " levitationists " do. Undoubt- 

 edly, there are very strong physical and biological 

 arguments for thinking itextremely improbable that 

 a man could be supported on the surface of the 

 water as the insect is ; or that his organisation 

 could be compatible with the possession and use of 

 wings ; or that he could rise through the air without 

 mechanical aid. Indeed, if we have any reason to 

 believe that our present knowledge of the nature 

 of things exhausts the possibilities of nature, we 

 might properly say that the attributes of men are 

 contradictory of walking on water, or floating in 

 the air, and consequently that these acts are truly 

 "impossible" for him. But it is sufficiently 

 obvious, not only that we are at the beginning of 

 our knowledge of nature, instead of having arrived 

 at the end of it, but that the limitations of our 

 faculties are such that we never can be in a position 

 to set bounds to the possibilities of nature. We 

 have knowledge of what is happening and of what 

 has happened ; of what will happen we have and 

 can have no more than expectation, grounded on 

 our more or less correct reading of past experience 

 and prompted by the faith, begotten of that experi- 

 ence, that the order of nature in the future will 

 resemble its order in the past. 



The same considerations apply to the other 



