THE GENESIS OF NATURE. 



19 



may have a meaning ; and certainly the study of the second 

 of these might put them on their guard against an intellectual 

 danger, curiously akin to the materialistic worshipping of 

 graven images. It is a most common practice in scientific 

 language to personify " nature," " evolution," and " the laws of 

 nature." No doubt it is an old practice. No doubt it very 

 often is a useful practice. No doubt it is in itself a perfectly 

 innocent practice. In itself there is no harm in making 

 graven images. Statuaiy is no breach of the second com- 

 mandment. But the harm comes when men begin to 

 idolize their statuary ; and nothing grows more imperceptibly, 

 more insidiously, more dangerously than idolatry. 



Let us look then at this vice of idolizing Nature. Philosophers 

 who have begun to speak of it as an impersonation, seem led 

 imperceptibly on to think of it as such, to ascribe to it intrinsic 

 powers, to regard it as the autocrat of its laws, to picture it as 

 a kind of demigod, without intellect or personality indeed, but 

 acting just as if it had both personality and intellect. The 

 result is that Nature is too frequently in scientific writings put 

 in the place of God. It is made to occupy in philosophy exactly 

 the position that an idol occupies in religion; and that with 

 nothing but an idol's power. Nature is assumed to be in its 

 essence the originator of all that goes on within its sphere, and 

 is treated as the legislator of what are called its laws ; it is the 

 doer, the causer, the worker of its phenomena. It appears as a 

 great universal undefined potency, which explains everything 

 except itself. Now all this is, to speak plainly, confusion of 

 thought. No one means, in the present state of knowledge, to 

 assert that Nature itself is the Auctor rerum, the prime and 

 ultimate cause ; no one, we suppose, really imagines that to 

 speak of Nature " doing," " arranging," " ordering," is to give 

 a rational explanation of the cause of the effects described. 

 Such phraseology does not find God in Nature ; but it does 

 make an idol, a juju, an obi, of Nature. And the consequence 

 is this — that, in research for the meaning of things, that is 

 accepted as an explanation of them, which is nothing more in 

 itself than a conventional expression, and means, at least 

 in the sense in which it is thus used, actually nothing at all. 

 The same may be said with regard to the cognate word, 

 Evolution." We are, in regard to this term, in tlie still further 

 a priori difficulty, that everybody knows it means something 

 exceedingly important, but nobody seems quite able to tell 

 exactly what it means. Passing, however, this protean 

 quality of the term, there can be no doubt that science has 



