500 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



for it. There was a stage of mental development in which 

 every unexplained fact or phenomenon was translated into 

 the direct expression of a divine will and purpose. But as 

 knowledge advanced the domain of the marvellous was 

 driven further and further back, and innumerable effects, 

 accounted for at first only by immediate supernatural 

 agency, began to be traced to the operation of natural 

 causes. Fixed sequences and relations displaced isolated 

 facts, and law began to take the place of arbitrariness and 

 caprice. And so step by step, as irregularity disappeared 

 and science shed on Nature its all-penetrating light, the 

 darkness in which superstition lived was chased away, and 

 its divinities exorcised from the world. But as the process 

 went on, it had unfortunately sometimes happened that 

 sincere but unenlightened friends of religion had exhibited 

 that jealousy of science which only superstition had just 

 cause to feel. The conflict on this ground between science 

 and theology was, however, a purely imaginary one. In 

 the observation of Nature and the tracing out of her 

 uniform sequences and laws there was, rightly viewed, 

 nothing that led to the suppression of a higher faith, and 

 such an influence could only be ascribed to scientific pur- 

 suits by setting up in the mind a false opposition between 

 law and personality. Men wanted to trace a personal 

 thought and agency, the marks of spiritual, supernatural 

 presence in the universe. But the unreflecting mind was 

 apt to associate personality with mere will, and to attach 

 to fixed movement, unbending order and adjustment, the 

 notion of something mechanical, of a blind, material 

 necessity, over which it was the prerogative of a per- 

 sonal intelligence to assert its superiority. This notion 

 was obviously one which deeper reflection and higher in- 

 tellect would tend to remove. For the more men ad- 

 vanced in intelligence, the more clearly did they begin to 

 see that it was only a vulgar necessity of thought which 



