12 THE REIGX OF LAW. 



pointed out. Man already knows far more than 

 he has power to convert to use. It is a true obser- 

 vation of Sir George Lewis* that Astronomy, for 

 example, in its higher branches, has an interest 

 almost purely scientific. It reveals to our know- 

 ledge perhaps the grandest and most sublime of 

 the physical laws of Xature. But a much smaller 

 amount of knowledge would suffice for the only 

 practical applications which we have yet been 

 able to make of these laws to our own use. Still, 

 that knowledge has a reflex influence on our 

 knowledge of ourselves, of our powers, and of the 

 relations which subsist between the constitution of 

 our own minds and the constitution of the universe. 

 And in other spheres of inquiry, advancing know- 

 ledge of physical laws has been constantly accom- 

 panied with advancing power over the physical 

 world. It has enabled us to do a thousand 

 things, any one of which, a few generations ago, 

 would have been considered supernatural. Nor 

 can it be said that this judgment of their char- 

 acter would have been erroneous. These thines 

 would have been superhuman then, though they 



* Astronomy of the Ancients, p. 254. 



