INDUCTIVE HABITS. 307 



This step so much resembles the mode in which 

 one intelligent being understands and apprehends 

 the conceptions of another, that we cannot be 

 surprised if those persons in whose minds such a 

 process has taken place, have been most ready 

 to acknowledge the existence and operation of a 

 superintending intelligence, whose ordinances it 

 was their employment to study. When they had 

 just read a sentence of the table of the laws of the 

 universe, they could not doubt whether it had had 

 a legislator. When they had decyphered there 

 a comprehensive and substantial truth, they could 

 not believe that the letters had been thrown to- 

 gether by chance. They could not but readily 

 acknowledge that what their faculties had en- 

 abled them to read, must have been written by 

 some higher and profounder mind. And accord- 

 ingly, we conceive it will be found, on examining 

 the works of those to whom we owe our know- 

 ledge of the laws of nature, and especially of the 

 wider and more comprehensive laws, that such 

 persons have been strongly and habitually im- 

 pressed with the persuasion of a Divine Purpose 

 and Power which had regulated the events which 

 they had attended to, and ordained the laws 

 which they had detected. 



To those who have pursued science without 

 reaching the rank of discoverers ; who have 

 possessed a derivative knowledge of the laws of 

 nature which others had disclosed, and have em- 



