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EIGHT EEV. THE BISHOP OF DOWX^ D.D., ON 



which have this peculiarity. It makes life and faith easy 

 for them. And, as we shall see, there are schools of thinkers 

 in our time whose whole philosophy consists in an effort to 

 prove that thinking in water-tight compartments is true and 

 right thinking. 



But the majority of thinking people are not thus con- 

 stituted. Even when they accept scientific principles and 

 methods on tlie one hand, and religion with its principles and 

 methods on the other, they are constantly disturbed by the 

 uncomfortable suspicion that somehow or other their whole life 

 needs a reconciliation which they ought to effect but have no 

 means of effecting, or, if their faith is of a very intense kind, 

 they have a deep underlying conviction that there exists some 

 reconciliation which lies beyond the grasp of their thought. 



Let us consider briefly how this difficulty arises. It is due 

 surely in the first instance to the fact that science goes upon 

 the principle of physical causation. It regards the universe as 

 a connected system of related things and events pervaded by 

 necessity. Natural law governs the whole. According to this 

 scheme of thought, the condition of the world at any moment is 

 the necessary outcome of what it was at the previous moment : 

 the universe is a vast mechanism in which every element is 

 determined by relation to all the others. In the eighteenth 

 century this idea was confirmed by the discovery and descrip- 

 tion of the mechanism of the heavens. In the nineteenth 

 century its scope was extended by the great doctrine of evolu- 

 tion. True, this latter seemed to leave mere mechanism behind. 

 It added to the idea of mechanism the hio;her idea of ors^anic 

 growth. But it did not get rid of the idea of an order dominated 

 by necessity. Eather it seemed, in its earlier statements, at all 

 events, to link biology to mechanism, and to show that 

 elements which, for earlier thinkers, seemed to break free from 

 the control of merely natural law are really in complete 

 bondage. Thus arose that naturalistic monism of which 

 Haeckel may be regarded as the most characteristic exponent. 



Science certainly goes upon the supposition that the unex- 

 plained may always be explained on these principles, if we can 

 only get deep enough. It does not, in practice, admit exceptions. 

 Its aim is ever to banish the mysterious and unaccountable. 

 If told that life, for example, is a new beginning which cannot 

 be brought into one system with matter and motion, and 

 explained in terms of mechanism aud chemistry, it answers 

 " Wait and See." If confuted by the facts of consciousness and 

 will it urges the danger of hasty assertion in view of the steady 



