THE ATTITUDE OF SCIENCE TOWARDS MIRACLES. jis: 
tendency in the young keen minds of some, who had been serious 
students of science at the Universities, to turn away from the 
narrow materialism of the last generation towards a more reverent 
hesitancy in asserting anything like dogmatic certainty or finality 
in conclusions, which seemed for the time to be warranted with the 
advance of scientific discovery and thought, and yet seemed to 
present insuperable difficulties to the acceptance of the great 
Christian verities, because these rested upon evidence which 
appealed to a preterscientific range of consciousness. He would 
remind those present that within the range of the human 
consciousness there are many things which appeal to what 
transcends those generalisations and conceptions at which the 
student of nature and of natural laws arrived from the study of 
material things ; laws of the universe of being, which in fact appeal 
to the powers of spiritual perception in man, which constitute the 
region of a reasoned faith. 
The speaker went on to say that he could not accept the 
reasoning of Spinoza, which had been quoted, because a jpetitio 
principit underlies it in common with the general dictum of Herbert 
Spencer as to “the unknowable,” in the assumption that we know 
enough of the Author of the Universe to be able to postulate what 
He can or cannot do—the fallacy of measuring the Infinite by the 
finite. It savoured of the intrusion of ideas of human legislation 
into the region of the Divine. It may fairly be contended that in 
nature there is no place for “ Divine decrees ” (hwmano sensu) ; that 
on fuller thought and reflection the notion of a Divine “decree” or 
fiat resolves itself into the working of Dive thought realising itself in 
life and form; and (with Mosley) that the idea of Divine creative 
thought ceasing to act is unthinkable. There is, therefore, 
infinitely more room for the introduction into the order of nature 
(so far as it is known to us) of modifications through the direction 
(by creative will) of tendencies obscured from scientific observation, 
than there is for the admitted fact of the modification, within more 
limited regions, of the course of natural events by the action of the 
human will. Spinoza and Herbert Spencer, in different ways, seem 
to fall into the logical snare of adopting a universal negutive, based 
in the last resort on the limitations of their own powers of 
conception of the possible; the more reverent and safer attitude 
of the present scientific spirit, among the younger and more 
