330 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



the first appearing and becoming of things, even all 

 associations of particular effects Avith particular ante- 

 cedent conditions, are, as our scientific thinkers from 

 Hume to Mill and Spencer allow, equally inexplicable, 

 equally mysterious, equally, if you will, miracles. But 

 it is the business of Science to ascertain the laws and 

 conditions under which these facts and appearances 

 present themselves, to discover the constant relations 

 governing both their successive and simultaneous states. 

 These laws Science can discover ; to do so is her special 

 work, interesting to the thinker and the savant, and 

 useful to the world; but she has learned, from the 

 futility of all such speculations, to decline the further 

 questions why matter has such properties, why it is 

 governed by such laws, why it undergoes such Protean 

 transformations. She has long since handed over the 

 question of the why of phenomena to metaphysics, 

 reserving to herself the question of the hoiv, the question 

 of fact. Nor has metaphysics made much of the other 

 problem of the why, over which she has so long puzzled 

 herself. In the end, we must confess that we cannot tell 

 why final facts are so, why they have been so, or why 

 they should continue so ; and certainly the miracle and 

 final mystery of Nature's ultimate facts and processes is 

 not diminished by the postulate, which can never be 

 proved, of a power lodged behind Nature, acting after 

 the human fashion, moving, constructing, meditating, 

 selecting as we men do, and still less by the further sup- 

 position of such a power acting in a manner entirely 

 supernatural as well as inconceivable, in the evoking of 

 worlds and organisms from pure nonentity, or the void 

 of space. 



4. Here appear the outlines of a new and formick- 

 able materialistic system. Here once again the hydra- 



