THE RELATIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION, ETC. 277 



adumbrated in the concluding paragraph of Newton's Principia, 

 which gives, perhaps, what is still the most comprehensive 

 description of its general character. " Something," he there says, 



might be added respecting a certain most subtle spirit per- 

 vading dense bodies and latent in them, by whose force and 

 actions the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at 

 the smallest distances, and when made contiguous cling 

 tognther ; and electrical bodies act at greater distances, both by 

 repelling and by attracting neighbouring corpuscles ; and light is 

 emitted, reflected, refiacted and bent, and bodies are heated ; 

 and all sensation is excited, and the members of animals are 

 moved at will, by the vibrations, that is, of this spirit propa- 

 gated through the solid capillaments of the nerves from the 

 external organs of the senses to the brain,and from the brain to the 

 muscles. But these things cannot be brielly explained ; and there 

 is not at present a sufficient supply of experiments, by which 

 the laws of the actions of this spirit can be accurately determined 

 and exhibited." Those words were written in 1686, and it seems 

 strange that nearly two centuries should have had to elapse 

 before, in the middle of the last century, the laws of the action 

 of this subtle spirit began to be accurately determined ; until 

 science has reached the marvellous conception of an ether 

 which pervades all space, so that, as Professor Bonney say& 

 (Recent Advances 171 Physical Science, p. 25) : " in the mind of 

 the modern physicist, tlie material universe and everything else 

 in it, not excepting our own bodies, can be traced back ultimately 

 to ether and electricity, or some special form of strain, that is, to 

 ether and an operation of eneigy. This conclusion has more 

 than realized that vision of the ancient seer, which declares 

 that, at the beginning of the manifestations of creative power, 

 ' the earth was without form and void, and , . . the Spirit 

 of God moved upon the face of the waters.' " That the last result 

 of modern science should thus be described, by a recent President 

 of the liritish Association, in the opening words of the first 

 chapter of Genesis, is perhaps the most striking illustration of 

 the progress made in what Sir Oliver Lodge has called, in his 

 instructive book On Man and. the Universe, " the reconciliation 

 of Science and Faith." 



One striking instance of that reconciliation may be quoted 

 from Sir Oliver's book, which will bring us back to the point 

 from which we started. Professor Tyndall, starting from the 

 Canons of Science which he expounded so brilliantly, could see 

 nothing in the human soul but a poetic expression for an unin- 

 telligible conception. But Sir Oliver Lodge (p. 77 of the 16th 



