THE MECHANICAL CONCEPTION OP NATURE. 239 



G. B. BucKTON, Esq., i\R.S., writes : — 



The Institute may be congratulated on the receipt of Professor 

 Macloskie's thoughtful and very interesting paper. The following 

 remarks are made only with a view to discussion. They make no 

 claim to originality. 



Perhaps it is inevitable that giants must be slain more than once 

 in a generation. If premises alter, conclusions must be modified. 

 Arguments pro and con on abstract ideas must recur with more 

 or less novelty in them. 



The conception of a Mechanical Universe as restricted to phy- 

 sical phenomena appears to be reasonable and in a measure 

 compelling. Though the scientific man admits of no interruption 

 of continuity, and the sequence of phenomena implies means to 

 ends, the extreme links of causation are hidden to our conceptions. 

 For those who admit the necessity of a Supreme and beneficent 

 Intelligence it seems difficult to see how reason can fail to assent 

 to final purpose. Argument is not sensibly weakened by the 

 knowledge that to us, in exceptional cases, the purpose seems to 

 be thwarted or only in part carried out. 



Objections have been made that the human eye is not stxictly 

 compensated for spherical and chromatic aberration by its humours. 

 Yet its value to us for all practical purposes is sufficient, inasmuch 

 as we are not aware of the eye's chromaticity, and we are not 

 assured that the mind does not itself make its own compensation 

 of the error, if there be one. 



We may conceive physical phenomena as grouped under the 

 two heads of matter and energy. Both of these finally resolve 

 themselves into ultimate facts. They pass into abstracts which we 

 all believe in, though their natures are unprovable, and their 

 genesis in time and place is inconceivable. If the dictum of one of 

 our chief thinkers be accepted, we learn that matter has stamped on 

 it the marks of a manufactured article ; yet no one has shown in 

 a similar sense such to be a condition of intellect in the abstract. 



Pascal says " I know " therefore I am superior to matter and 

 to unconscious energy. Choice implies a power to select and to 

 control one law through the intervention of a higher law. Thus 

 will is before law, though in the human economy it is not inde- 

 pendent of it. 



The physical life of an organism is intimately bound up with 

 the chemical changes involved with nutrition and other functions. 

 Biologists have not helped us much as to the conception of 



