374 RELIGIOUS VIEWS. 



virtue and depravity, if ever they are the subjects 

 of strict science, must belong to a science which 

 views these things, not with reference to time or 

 space, or mechanical causation, not with refer- 

 ence to fluid or ether, nervous irritability or cor- 

 poreal feeling, but to their own proper modes of 

 conception ; with reference to the relations with 

 which it is possible that these notions may be 

 connected, and not to relations suggested by 

 other subjects of a completely extraneous and 

 heterogeneous nature. And according to such 

 relations must the laws of the moral world be 

 apprehended, by any intelligence which con- 

 templates them at all. 



There can be no wider interval in philosophy 

 than the separation which must exist between the 

 laws of mechanical force and motion, and the laws 

 of free moral action. Yet the tendency of men 

 to assume, in the portions of human knowledge 

 which are out of their reach, a similarity of type 

 to those with which they are familiar, can leap 

 over even this interval. Laplace has asserted 

 that " an intelligence which, at a given instant, 

 should know all the forces by which nature is 

 urged, and the respective situation of the beings 

 of which nature is composed, if, moreover, it 

 were sufficiently comprehensive to subject these 

 data to calculation, would include in the same 

 formula, the movements of the largest bodies of 

 the universe and those of the slightest atom. 



