SCIENCE AND MAN. 337 



back to an abysmal past. One of the qualities which 

 he has derived from the past is the yearning to let in 

 the light of principles on the otherwise bewildering 

 flux of phenomena. He has been described by the 

 German Lichtenberg as ' das rastlose Ursachenthier ' 

 the restless cause-seeking animal in whom facts excite 

 a kind of hunger to know the sources from which they 

 spring. Never, I venture to say, in the history of the 

 world has this longing been more liberally responded to, 

 both among men of science and the general public, than 

 during the last thirty or forty years. I say ' the gen- 

 eral public,' because it is a feature of our time that the 

 man of science no longer limits his labours to the so- 

 ciety of his colleagues and his peers, but shares, as far 

 as it is possible to share, with the world at large the 

 fruits of enquiry. 



The celebrated Robert Boyle regarded the universe 

 as a machine; Mr. Carlyle prefers regarding it as a tree. 

 He loves the image of the umbrageous Igdrasil better 

 than that of the Strasburg clock. A machine may be 

 defined as an organism with life and direction outside; 

 a tree may be defined as an organism with life and 

 direction within. In the light of these definitions, I 

 close with the conception of Carlyle. The order and 

 energy of the universe I hold to be inherent, and not 

 imposed from without, the expression of fixed law and 

 not of arbitrary will, exercised by what Carlyle would 

 call an Almighty Clockmaker. But the two concep- 

 tions are not so much opposed to each other after all. 

 In one fundamental particular'they at all events agree. 

 They equally imply the interdependence and harmoni- 

 ous interaction of parts, and the subordination of the 

 individual powers of the universal organism to the 

 working of the whole. 



Never were the harmony and interdependence just 



