Mr. Herbert Spencer 35 
ning, are now, and ever shall be, but we are deadened if 
they are required of us on a scale which is visible to the 
naked eye. If we are told to work them our hands fall 
nerveless down ; if, come what may, we must do or die, 
we are more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If we 
are required to believe them—which only means to fuse 
them with our other ideas—we either take the law into 
our own hands, and our minds being in the dark fuse 
something easier of assimilation, and say we have fused 
the miracle ; or if we play more fairly and insist on our 
minds swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our 
judgments, and 70 tanto kill our souls. If we stick out 
beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at the 
best make Coleridges of ourselves ; and yet upon a small 
scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of 
life ; to cease to work them is to die. And by miracle 
I do not merely mean something new, strange, and not 
very easy of comprehension—I mean something which 
violates every canon of thought which in the palpabe 
world we are accustomed to respect ; something as alien 
to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the 
destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of some- 
thing out of nothing. This, which when writ large maddens 
and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends 
each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless 
fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as 
consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, 
or as life and death. 
Claude Bernard says, Rien ne natt, rien ne se crée, tout 
se continue. La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune 
création, elle est d’une éernelle continuation ;* but surely 
he is insisting upon one side of the truth only, to the 
neglect of another which is just as real, and just as impor- 
tant ; he might have said, Rien ne se continue, tout natt, 
* Quoted by M. Vianna De Lima in his “ Exposé Sommaire,” &c., 
p. 6. Paris, Delagrave, 1886, 
