854 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



It is now generally admitted that the man of to-day is 

 the child and product of incalculable antecedent time. 

 His physical and intellectual textures have been woven 

 for him during his passage through phases of history and 

 forms of existence which lead the mind back to an abys- 

 mal past. One of the qualities which he has derived from 

 that past is the yearning to let in the light of principles 

 on the otherwise bewildering flux of phenomena. He has 

 been described by the German Lichtenberg as "das rast- 

 lose 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 labors 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 inquiry. 



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 denned 

 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 concep- 

 tion 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 



