598 FR A GMENTS OF 



public, than during the last thirty or forty years. I say 

 "the general public/' because it "is a feature of our time 

 that the man of science no longer limits his labors to the 

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

 it is possible to share, with the world at large the fruits of 

 inquiry. 



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 expres- 

 sion of fixed law and not of arbitrary will, exercised by 

 what Carlyle would call an Almighty Clockmaker. But 

 the two conceptions 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 

 harmonious 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 

 referred to so clearly recognized as now. Our insight 

 regarding them is not that vague and general insight to 

 which our fathers had attained, and which, in early times, 

 was more frequently affirmed by the synthetic poet than by 

 the scientific man. The interdependence of our day has 

 become quantitative expressible by numbers leading, it 

 must be added, directly into that inexorable reign of law 

 which so many gentle people regard with dread. In the 

 domain now under review men of science had first to work 

 their way from darkness into twilight, and from twilight 

 into day. There is no solution of continuity in science. It is 

 not given to any man, however endowed, to rise spontane- 

 ously into intellectual splendor without the parentage of 

 antecedent thought. Great discoveries grow. Here, as in 

 other cases, we have first the seed, then the ear, then the 

 full corn in the ear, the last member of the series implying 

 the first. Thus, as regards the discovery of gravitation 

 with which the name of Newton is identified, notions more 

 or less clear concerning it had entered many minds before 



