SCIENCE AND MAN. 337 



for him during his passage through phases of history 

 and forms of existence which lead the mind back to an 

 abysmal past. One of the qualities which he has de- 

 rived from that past is the yearning to let in the light 

 of principles on the otherwise bewildering flux of phe- 

 nomena. He has been described by the German Lich- 

 tenberg 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 general 

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

 of science no longer limits his labours 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 

 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 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 indi- 



