IN MODERN SCIENCE. 



S9 



yet it may suffice to indicate the necessity of a 

 living and determining First Cause. 



The fact that all the manifestations of force 

 are regulated by law by no means favors the 

 agnostic view. The laws of nature are merely 

 mental generalizations of our own, and, so far 

 as they go, show a remarkable harmony be- 

 tween our mental nature and that manifested 

 in the universe. They are not themselves pow- 

 ers capable of producing effects, but merely 

 express what we can ascertain of uniformity 

 of action in nature. The law of gravitation, 

 for example, gives no clew to the origin of that 

 force, but merely expresses its constant mode 

 of action, in whatever way that may have been 

 determined at first. Nor are natural laws de- 

 crees of necessity. They might have been 

 otherwise — nay, many of them may be other- 

 wise in parts of the universe inaccessible to us, 

 or they may change in process of time ; for the 

 period over which our knowledge extends may 

 be to the plans of the Creator like the lifetime 

 of some minute insect which might imagine 

 human arrangements of no great permanence 

 to be of eternal duration. 



Unless the laws of nature were constant, in 

 so far as our experience extends, we could have 



