366 NATURE AND MAN. 



history of the earth has taken the place of the Mosaic Cosmogony 

 in the current behef of educated men, notwithstanding all the 

 denunciations of theological orthodoxy. Any one who should 

 now maintain the universality of the Noachian Deluge, to doubt 

 which was once to peril one's salvation, would be laughed at as an 

 ignoramus. The antiquity of man, which no more than twenty 

 years ago was repudiated as a dangerous heresy, has already 

 passed beyond the region of discussion. And so, it is affirm&J, 

 as the doctrine of evolution has now established itself in the minds 

 of all competent judges as an indisputable verity, science — which 

 formerly attacked and mastered only the outworks of theology — 

 will be assuredly no less successful in its assault on the citadel 

 itself The " creation " of the Old Revelation will fall before the 

 " evolution " of the New ; the notion of power will be superseded 

 by that of law; the evidences of "design" will be disposed of by 

 the fact of " natural selection ; " and the "potencies" of matter 

 will henceforth be the only subjects about which sensible men 

 will concern themselves. 



Now I fully accept it as the highest work of the man of 

 science, whatever his department of study, to seek out those 

 "laws" which express the order of Nature. But I affirm that 

 even supposing him to have so completely succeeded in his 

 search, as to be able to formulate a general statement in which 

 they could be all embodied, and from which all the phenomena 

 of the universe could be traced out deductively, the question 

 of the cause of those phenomena would be left just where it 

 was ; the " law " simply expressing the order and physical con- 

 ditions of their concurrence, and giving no real "explanation" of 

 them. 



Much of what seems to me a prevalent confusion of thought 

 on this subject — nothing being more common than to speak of 

 laws as " governing " or " regulating " phenomena, and to affirm 

 that phenomena are sufficiently "accounted for" when they can 

 be shown to be "consequences" of a law — seems to me to be 

 traceable to the double sense in which the word " law " is habitu- 

 ally used. And the purpose of my present paper will be to help 

 my readers to " think themselves clear " upon this matter ; by 

 showing the fundamental difference between the kgal and the 



