MIRACLES AND SPECIAL PROVIDENCES. 365 



dilations true to the second. We determine the dates of 

 those that have occurred in the early times of history, and 

 find calculation and history in harmony. Anomalies and 

 perturbations in the planets have been over and over again 

 observed; but th'ese, instead of demonstrating any incon- 

 stancy on the part of natural law, have invariably been 

 reduced to consequences of that law. Instead of referring 

 the perturbations of Uranus to any interference on the 

 part of the Author of nature with the law of gravitation, 

 the question which the astronomer proposed to himself 

 wa-s, " How, in accordance with this law, can the pertur- 

 bation be produced?" Guided by a principle, he was en- 

 abled to fix the point of space in which, if a mass of mat- 

 ter were placed, the observed perturbations would follow. 

 We know the result. The practical astronomer turned his 

 telescope toward the region which the intellect of the 

 theoretic astronomer had already explored, and the planet 

 now named Neptune was found in its predicted place. A 

 very respectable 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 irrational de- 

 partment " 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 Jupiter, or the white- 

 ness 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 exercise of trie inductive principle, which, 

 reiterates Mr. Mozley, is " purely practical," have been 

 expended upon subjects as unpractical as these. What 

 practical interest 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 perform 

 small motions which synchronize with the appearance and 

 disappearance of the solar spots? And yet, I doubt not, 

 Sir Edward Sabine would deem a life of intellectual toil 



