1879.] 
The Course of Nature. 
75 
more unreservedly we accept its teachings. It tells us 
that the whole course of nature takes place in accord- 
ance with certain laws capable of expression in mathe- 
matical language ; that these laws aft with more than an 
iron rigour, and without any regard to consequences ; that 
they are deaf to prayer or entreaty, and know no such thing 
as sympathy or remorse ; that if we would succeed we must 
study them, and so govern ourselves that their aCtion shall 
enure to our benefit. 
The other school is that of sympathy, emotion, and reli- 
gious faith. In it, as children, we receive cur first teachings. 
It shows us ourselves placed, as it were, in a forest of 
mystery, surrounded by forms over which we have no con- 
trol, and able to penetrate so little into the surrounding 
darkness that we cannot tell what shall happen to us on 
the morrow. It has in all ages peopled the thickets with 
invisible beings having an interest in our welfare or our 
injury, or with providential interferences designed to com- 
pass ends of which we in advance have no conception. Its 
teachings are nearest and most welcome in times of affliction 
and fear. Its objections to the teachings of the other school 
are heard far and wide through the land. Notwithstanding 
the number of forms which these objections take, their 
essence may be condensed into a very few sentences. The 
following will probably be accepted as a fair rendering of 
their substance. 
You take a contracted and unphilosophical view of nature 
when you say that the world is governed by inexorable laws. 
These laws are not governors, but only the instruments of 
government by which the real governor executes his pur- 
poses. With them, but without subverting or violating 
them, he can reward or punish, bring on prosperity or call 
down disaster, according to the dictates of his sovereign 
will. The child and the peasant call the thunder the voice 
of God. The modern philosopher attempts to correct them 
by showing that it is the product of evaporation and of 
atmospheric electricity. But the view of the child is really 
the more correct of the two, because he ascends at once to 
the first cause, and thus sees further than the philosopher 
who corrects him, because the latter stops short at the 
immediate or secondary cause without even trying to raise 
his eyes to the higher source of power. I think I am not 
far wrong in giving this as the substance of the most cogent 
objections which may be anticipated in any quarter against 
the mechanical theory of the course of nature. 
Now, if these views referred only to inscrutable first 
