924 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XV. No. 389. 



' things in heaven and earth not dreamt 

 of in ' their ' philosophy, ' these words must 

 have struck on the self-complacent minds 

 of his generation as something to be 

 tolerated as poetic license, rather than as 

 accurate in philosophic meaning. Com- 

 pared with ours, that whole century was 

 satisfied with itself and its knowledge of 

 the infinite, and content in its happy be- 

 lief that it knew nearly everything that 

 was really worth knowing. This 'nearly 

 everything' which it thought it knew about 

 the universe, it called the ' laws of nature. ' 



It was to this belief in the general mind, 

 I think, that the success of Hume's argu- 

 ment was due. 



The present generation has begun, if not 

 to be modest or humble, to be somewhat less 

 arrogant in the assumption of its knowl- 

 edge. We are perhaps beginning to under- 

 stand, not in a purely poetical sense, but 

 in a very real one, that there may be all 

 around us in heaven and earth, things be- 

 yond measure, of which 'philosophy' not 

 only knows nothing, but has not dreamed. 



As a consequence of this, there is growing 

 to be an unspoken, rather than clearly for- 

 mulated, admission that we know little of 

 the order of nature, and nothing at all of 

 the 'laws' of nature. 



Now if we are at present at least, dis- 

 posed to speak of an observed 'order' of 

 nature (not carrying with it the impli- 

 cation of necessity denoted by 'law'), I 

 think we have some reason to say that there 

 is a prescience of a change in common 

 thought about this matter, and that it is 

 owing to this that we are coming to be 

 where we are. 



I do not know that there is a less wide 

 belief in the gospel miracles in our day, but 

 if it were so, the decline in the weight given 

 Hume's argument is not due solely to that, 

 for it may surely be said that it was not 

 merely an argument against gospel mir- 

 acles, but against all the prodigies to be 



found in history, sacred and profane, 

 where he doubtless had in mind traditions 

 of stones falling out of heaven, cures 

 wrought by psychological agency, and the 

 like, all ' superstitions ' to the men of his 

 day. These if they no longer believed in a 

 deity, were none the less shocked by the 

 culpable existence of such vulgar beliefs 

 in conflict with the deified ' laws of nature, ' 

 while such 'superstitions' have in our 

 day become subjects of modest inquiry. 



Let me quote from a later writer, whose 

 point of view is singularly difilerent from 

 that of Hume and his contemporaries, and 

 who in answer to the question, 'What is a 

 miracle 1' begins by reminding us that the 

 reply will depend very much upon the in- 

 telligence of the being who answers it, or 

 whom the miracle is wrought for. 



"To my horse, do I not work a miracle 

 every time I open for him an impassable 

 turnpike ? ' ' 



' ' But is not a real miracle simply a viola- 

 tion of the 'laws of nature'? ask several. 

 AATiat are the laws of nature 1 Is it not the 

 deepest law of nature that she be con- 

 stant 1 ' ' cries the illuminated class ; " is not 

 the machine of the universe fixed to move 

 by unalterable rules?" 



' ' I believe that nature, that the universe, 

 which no one whom it so pleases can be pre- 

 vented from calling a machine, does move 

 by the most unalterable rules. And now 

 I make the old inquiry as to what those 

 same unalterable rules, forming the com- 

 plete statute-book of nature, may possibly 

 be? 



'"They stand written in our works of 

 science, ' say you ; 'in the accumulated 

 records of man's experience.' Was man 

 with his experience present at the creation, 

 then, to see how it all went on ? Have any 

 deepest scientific individuals yet dived 

 down to the foundations of the universe, 

 and gauged everything there ? Alas, these 

 scientific individuals have been nowhere 



