Or, THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE n 



In fact, it is hardly too much to say that the 

 essential and fundamental difference between 

 ancient and modern physical science lies in the 

 ascertainment of the true laws of statics and 

 dynamics in the course of the last three centuries ; 

 and in the invention of mathematical methods of 

 dealing with all the consequences of these laws. 

 The ultimate aim of modern physical science is 

 the deduction of the phenomena exhibited by 

 material bodies from physico-mathematical first 

 principles. Whether the human intellect is 

 strong enough to attain the goal set before it 

 may be a question, but thither will it surely 

 strive. 



The third great scientific event of our time, the 

 rehabilitation of the doctrine of evolution, is part 

 of the same tendency of increasing knowledge to 

 unify itself, which has led to the doctrine of the 

 conservation of energy. And this tendency, a^ain 

 is mainly a product of the increasing str< 

 conferred by physical investigation on the belief 

 in the universal validity of that orderly relation 

 of facts, which we express by the so-called " Laws 

 of Nature." 



The growth of a plant from its seed, of an 

 animal from its egg, the apparent origin of in- 

 numerable living things from mud, or from the 

 putrefying remains of former organisms, had 

 furnished the earlier scientific thinkers with 



