12 Science Religion and Reality 



can absolve us from the plain duty of purifying or rejecting every 

 narrative in which a taint of the " miraculous " can be detected. 



VIII 



In spite of its apparent precision all this is very loose talk, 

 raising more questions than it answers. 



What, for example, is meant by the uniformity of nature ? 

 About the course of nature we know little ; yet surely we know 

 enough to make us hesitate to call it uniform. Phase follows 

 phase in a perpetual flow ; but every phase is unique. Nature, 

 as a whole, neither repeats itself, nor (according to science) can 

 possibly repeat itself Why, then, when we are considering it as 

 a whole, should we describe it as uniform .? 



Perhaps it will be said that amidst all this infinite variety some 

 fixed rules are always obeyed. Matter (for example) always 

 gravitates to matter. Energy is never either created or destroyed. 

 May we not — nay must we not — extend yet further this con- 

 ception of unbroken regularity, and accept the view that nature, 

 if not uniform as a whole, is nevertheless compounded of uni- 

 formities, of causal sequences, endlessly repeated, which collect- 

 ively illustrate and embody the universal reign of unalterable law ? 

 Were any of these causal sequences to fail, we should no doubt 

 be faced with a " miracle " ; but such an event (it is urged) would 

 violate all experience, and it need not be seriously considered. 



IX 



Now this has always seemed to me a most unsatisfactory 

 theory. It throws upon experience a load of responsibility which 

 experience is quite unable to bear. No doubt, as I have already 

 pointed out, the whole conduct of life depends upon our assuming, 

 instinctively or otherwise, that the kind of thing which has 

 happened once, will, under more or less similar circumstances, be 

 likely to happen again. But this assumption, whether instinctive 

 or reflective, whether wisely acted on or unwisely, supplies a very 

 frail foundation for the speculative structure sometimes based upon 

 it. Can it be denied, for example, that nature, uncritically observed, 

 seems honeycombed with irregularities, that the wildest excesses of 



