Darwinism Verified. 5 



parcel of science, and yet men remain as firm 

 theists as ever. The objection is, therefore, evi- 

 dently fallacious, and the fallacy is not difficult 

 to point out. It lies in a metaphysical miscon- 

 ception of the words " force " and " cause." 

 " Force " is implicitly regarded as a sort of en- 

 tity or daemon which has a mode of action distin- 

 guishable from that of universal Deity ; other- 

 wise it is meaningless to speak of substituting the 

 one for the other. But such a personification of 

 " force " is a remnant of barbaric thought, and is 

 in no wise sanctioned by physical science. When 

 astronomy speaks of two planets as attracting 

 each other with a "force" which varies directly 

 as their masses and inversely as the squares of 

 their distances apart, it simply uses the phrase 

 as a convenient metaphor by which to describe 

 the manner in which the observed movements of 

 the two bodies occur. It explains that in pres- 

 ence of each other the two bodies are observed to 

 change their positions in a certain specified way, 

 and this is all that it means. This is all that a 

 strictly scientific hypothesis can possibly allege, 

 and this is all that observation can possibly prove. 

 Whatever goes beyond this, and imagines or as- 

 serts a kind of "pull" between the two bodies, 

 is not science, but metaphysics. An atheistic 



