LAUGEL'S PROBLEMS OF NATURE AND LIFE. 317 



conveys ; but it is a word unreal to all thought, and 

 philosophy is bound to be sparing in the use of it. It 

 might be well, too, were theology, in dealing with 

 these terms of Infinity and Eternity, more thoughtful 

 and forbearing on the doctrines and denunciations to 

 which it applies them. Eternity has been well de- 

 scribed as ' a negative idea clothed with a positive 

 name.' Conceptions so vast are, in fact, only described 

 by negative terms the endless, the incomprehensible. 

 We are all more or less enslaved by words ; but it is 

 the proper business, equally of religion and philosophy, 

 to throw off this thraldom, when truth, as often hap- 

 pens, is fettered or distorted by it. 



We have just named Matter, Force, Motion, and 

 Life, as terms which in their most general sense give 

 foundation to all science, and at the same time express 

 its most profound and perplexing problems. The word 

 Force especially, known to us through its relation to 

 matter and motion in space, taxes the thought by a 

 sort of harsh compulsion of use. It is a term too 

 variously familiar in common life to be thus largely 

 appropriated by science. No present definition has 

 rescued it, in this higher sense, from a certain meta- 

 physical obscurity of meaning. We know force as a 

 reality only by what we term its effects ; and we 

 pluralise the word in speaking of the several forces 

 manifested in the phenomena of the natural world 

 while at the same time finding, in these very pheno- 

 mena, a correlation, by interchanges of material effects, 

 so exactly equivalent that nothing which we can term 

 force or power is lost in the translation. In this 



