368 NATURE AND MAN. 



changes his course of action as his own caprice or passion may 

 direct, but like that of a benevolent sovereign whose rule is in 

 uniform and orderly conformity with certain fixed principles, 

 originally determined as conducive to the welfare and happiness 

 of his people. 



Such, in the earlier stages of scientific inquiry, when the uni- 

 formities of Nature first attracted the attention of thoughtful men, 

 seems to have been the aspect under which the "laws" that 

 express them were generally regarded. While the Hebrew mind, 

 nursed in the idea of an anthropomorphic theocracy, regarded all 

 the phenomena of the universe as the immediate expressions of the 

 personal will of its national deity, and, so far from feeling any 

 incredulity as to "supernatural" or apparently disorderly occur- 

 rences, expected them as .the appropriate attestations of his 

 authority, the philosophers of Greece and Rome, who gave them- 

 selves rather to the study of the order of Nature, and were strongly 

 impressed by its uniformities, for the most part saw in them (as 

 expressed by the application of the word kosmos, originally 

 meaning "orderly arrangement," to designate the universe) the 

 manifestations of supreme designing and controlling minds.* 

 And among those who, nearer our own time, most advanced our 

 knowledge of that order, the same conception of the nature of the 

 "laws" expressive of it continued to prevail. Thus it is recorded 

 of Kepler, that when, after a life devoted to the search, he had 

 discovered the three laws of planetary motion which have made 

 his name immortal, he spoke with devout gratitude of the ample 

 reward he had received for his labours, in having been thus per- 

 mitted " to think the thoughts of God." And no one who has 

 followed the course of Newton's discoveries and his own mode of 

 viewing them, can doubt that this idea was alike dominant in his 

 mind. For when charged by some of the theologians of his time 

 with (as they affirmed) superseding the Divine agency in the pro- 

 duction of the movements of the planetary system, by attributing 

 them to hypothetical forces of his own creation, he defended 

 himself by showing that his "Principia" simply aimed to express 

 the mode in which that agency exerts itself. 



* Every reader of Cicero's treatise "De Natura Deorum" will recollect 

 this to be its " argument." 



