78 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



lie answers, " whether an effect determined according to nature's 

 laws can at the same time be produced by a free agent ? " But 

 there is the fact, mind modifies the force or energy in bread and 

 beef for a new and sensible result. Similar modifications, there- 

 fore, are possible elsewhere. 



I will take another example, and one which will illustrate other 

 prepositions of mine beside the one immediately before us. A 

 man receives a letter or reads an article in the newspaper, and 

 then sends a bullet into the breast of the man who wrote th§ 

 word?. Physical science calculates the force of the bullet, of the 

 powder, of the spring of the pistol, of the finger, of the brain, as 

 we may suppose, and so on. But the reading of that letter was an 

 act of mind : and mind supplied the motive for the act, but the 

 motive adds nothing whatever to the physical force. There is 

 nothing in mind which can be inserted into the chain of physical 

 antecedents. Motives, like moral results, belong to another 

 science, having its own laws, which do not interfere at all with 

 those of natural science, although physical results are modified in 

 the most remarkable manner. 



(8) Thirdly, my argument compels me to note that the narra- 

 tors of the marvels to which I have referred have no occasion to 

 offer any theory concerning these results, or, if they do offer one, 

 we are not concerned with that in our question of the a priori 

 credibility of the facts. Mr. Crooke's mode of accounting for 

 " spiritual " phenomena is quite another matter. One narrative puts 

 the subject on its proper footing where a man says, '' One thing I 

 know, that whereas I was blind, now I see." The only theory, 

 so far as I know, which the narrators offer in the Christian sacred 

 books, is that of the moral end and bearing of the events which 

 they describe, or what we find also in much Greek philosophy, 

 and may call the providential character of the events, which, of 

 course, would not essentially distinguish them from ordinary oc- 

 currences. But with this, science, as such, has nothing to do. 



I have only occasion to refer to it as illustrating my proposition 

 that witnesses of wonderful events can only give us their sensible 

 impressions. For example, dwelling on this providential charac- 

 ter of events, going back, therefore, to the first cause, and leaving 



