MIRACLES AND SPECIAL PROVIDENCES. 31 



outcome, it will be admitted, of an impulse which 

 ' rests upon no 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 irra- 

 tional department ' 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 Ju- 

 piter, or the whiteness 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 ex- 

 ercise of the inductive principle, which, reiterates Mr. 

 Mozley, is * purely practical,' have been expended upon 

 subjects as unpractical as these. What practical in- 

 terest 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 per- 

 form small motions which synchronise with the ap- 

 pearance and disappearance of the solar spots? And 

 yet, I doubt not, Sir Edward Sabine would deem a life 

 of intellectual toil amply rewarded by being privileged 

 to solve, at its close, these infinitesimal motions. 



The inductive principle is founded in man's desire 

 to know a desire arising from his position among 

 phenomena which are reducible to order by his intel- 

 lect. The material universe is the complement of the 

 intellect; and, without the study of its laws, reason 

 could never have awakened to the higher forms of self- 



