550 ALEXANDER PEDLER LECTURE 



If for a moment one grants that preposterously egotistic assumption, 

 what is to be said of the millions of tons of coal that were destroyed by 

 denudation long before their rightful owner was ready to use them ? 

 Indeed, when arguments of this sort are employed (and they are usually 

 the stock-in-trade of those most seriously anxious to give reverence 

 where it is due) the result is a dilemma from which blasphemy affords 

 the sole escape. Philosophy is the clothing of truth : a baby's vest is 

 inadequate, and indecent, on an adolescent. 



We must reconcile ourselves, and our philosophies, to the fact that 

 from the world's standpoint we have only just arrived. Although 

 during our brief career we have made an unconscionable mess of parts 

 of its surface, the globe continues to revolve unperturbed, and we cannot 

 imagine that our disappearance would cause it a passing tremor. To 

 those who have grown up in the belief that the world was made solely 

 for their occupation and benefit, this conclusion seems humiliating ; 

 but only the conceited can experience humiliation. Moreover, the third 

 scriptural criterion for a satisfactory and moral life involves humility. 

 There can be no incentive to progress for those who think that they have 

 already arrived, and there is no prospect but a fall for the arrogant. But 

 to those who are not blinded by conceit there is stimulation in the thought 

 that they are playing a part, however humble, in a vast drama ; and 

 elation in the knowledge that they, alone of the actors, can be more 

 than puppets in the show. 



If the first two of our considerations tend to induce humility, the 

 third surely inspires confidence. The constancy of natural laws, the 

 reiteration of cause and effect, the simplicity of the outline of history, 

 show that there are some principles at least in which we can trust. There 

 is an orderliness in Nature that we can appreciate without knowing its 

 origin or aim. One has but to read some of the cosmogonies of the last 

 few centuries, when the catastrophic school was trying to compress 

 the gallon of geological facts into the pint pot of canonical time, to realise 

 how profoundly our views are altered. These earnest attempts to 

 reconcile fiction with truth led to a conception of the world staggering 

 from one supernatural cataclysm to another, and make ludicrous reading 

 to-day. They evoke a picture of a Creator learning by trial and error, 

 with no set plan and very little patience — surely the butt of ribaldry 

 rather than the inspirer of reverence. There could be no security under 

 so fickle a tyrant, and no point in trying to understand a policy that 

 might be reversed at any time. 



Just laws must bind the legislator no less than his subjects ; and it 

 is a heartening thought to realise that even in Cambrian times the sun 

 shone and the rain fell with the same sort of effects as they produce 

 to-day. It gives confidence to know that, come what may, effect follows 

 cause as day follows night, and that in a world of seeming change and 

 decay there are principles and processes that are eternal. In the material 

 world at least we can know where we are, and what to expect. There are 

 laws that neither time nor circumstance can alter. We can discover 

 their gist, learn to obey them, and so acquire power beyond imagination ; . 

 and on the other hand we can ignore them or defy them, and perish. 



The geological record shows that we have but a small, perhaps transient, 



