1882.] The Order of the Universe. 485 



The majority of men in all ages, and most of the accepted 

 religions of mankind, have adopted the dualistic theory. By it 

 the mind of man was relieved from all speculations regarding the 

 nature of the material universe, every ordinary occurrence was 

 referred to the action of a creative and preservative force, and 

 extraordinary phenomena were unhesitatingly ascribed to a more 

 direct agency of that force. 



But the spirit of inquiry is natural to the human mind, when it 

 is not distorted by education or paralyzed by sloth. Certain re- 

 sults were observed to follow certain causes with unerring regu- 

 larity, whether in the broad domains of astronomy or in the nar- 

 row limits of human activities, and confidence in these results be- 

 came so unbounded that men in their daily life, while theoreti- 

 cally believing in an omnipotent and omnipresent power, based all 

 their actions upon the known properties of material things. This 

 dual code of life is that observed throughout Christendom at the 

 present epoch, and causes strange eccentricities. 



To explain this inconsistency, the idea of law arose. The om- 

 nipotent, all-knowing power which made matter and gave it its 

 properties either cannot (a contradiction) or will not change those 

 properties. Laws once made were conceived to continue either 



by the 



properties originally impressed upon 1 



* by the continual preservative power of that creator, exercised 

 'variably according to certain fixed rules which he has made for 

 himself, and according to a prearranged design which he has pro- 

 Posed .to himself to work out. 



Under this phase of dualism, a belief in any departure from the 

 Known laws of matter becomes an improbability amounting almost 

 to the impossibility of such departure which is the logical result 

 of the monistic view. This elimination from the order of the 

 universe of any present interference of a creative power, reduces 

 iat P ower to the position of a passive spectator, or, at most, of 

 1 exec utor of laws framed in the far past, and is, therefore, rightly 

 egarded by rigid dualists as a great concession in favor of 

 Monism. 



A dualist conceives consciousness, or the soul, to be a direct 

 emanation from the deity, imprisoned for a certain time within 

 ^aterial bonds, but prompt at its liberation to return either to the 

 who gave it or to the punishment provided for it in conse- 

 4 ence f its misdeeds. To account for the existence of evil, the 



