THE ATTITUDE OF SCIENCE TOWARDS MIRACLES. 85 
great common highway. They bow, salute, and may smile,— 
and that is all! But, is science in such bondage to uniformity 
as the Archbishop seems to suppose? Is she the impotent 
vassal of the natural formule which she justly glories in having 
discovered ? Was there no science during the patient investiga- 
tions preceding these discoveries, when as yet the rounds of the 
ladder were unshaped? Was science unborn when walks and 
talks with nature were leading on to the acquisition of her 
secrets ? Though not mature, science was certainly not then 
unborn; she was beginning to know nature, and thus to carry 
out her great mission of subduing the earth; she was laying 
the foundations without which the future edifice had been 
impossible. 
fo...Dr: Temple “Science” appears to have stood for 
“Natural Science” only, and to a narrow concept of science he 
added a narrow concept of scientific procedure. Yet even were 
science so “cribbed, cabined, and confined,” she still might 
be permitted to investigate into extraordinary phenomena such 
as earthquakes, eclipses, and miracles; for there could be no 
certainty a priori that these events might not be included in a 
uniformity greater and vaster than is that presented to us by 
«the laws of nature.” Science is constantly telling us that lesser 
uniformities are included in higher—eg., the law of weight, 
the law of tides, the law of the earth’s centripetal force, are 
included in the wider law of gravitation. Dr. Temple himself 
endorses this thought when, alluding to “the uniformity of 
nature,’ he remarks that “this regularity is seen to be more 
and more widely pervading all phenomena of every class, until 
the mind is forced to conceive the possibility that it may be 
absolutely universal* “ 
If so, it may include miracles, even upon his own definition 
that a miracle is “an event which we cannot assign to that 
derivative action to which we have been led to assign the 
great body of events; we cannot explain it except by referring it 
to direct and spontaneous action, to a will like our own will.” 
Since Miracles are phenomena—exceptional phenomena—in 
nature, Science properly concerns herself with them. For 
(1) Science takes note of individual facts, otherwise she could 
not classify ; (2) Science is busy with the ordinary and common, 
and therefore must also recognize the extraordinary and un- 
common, as differing; (3) Science seeks material for classifi- 
* “Relations between Religion and Science” (Bampton Lectures for 
1884). 
