i879-] 
The Course of Nature. 
87 
same way in the two cases. You must not claim that he 
will produce heat or cold by a fiat of an arbitrary will, unless 
you also claim that He will build the hospital or leave it 
unbuilt according to a similar fiat. Nor is it of any avail to 
say that you know it to be His will that the hospital shall 
remain unbuilt unless man undertakes it. We can, in reply, 
maintain that we know it to be His will that the course of 
nature shall go on unchanged, no matter how it may affedt 
human interests. 
It thus appears that the dividing line between mechanical 
and final causes, as drawn by the human mind in all ages, 
has not been fixed by any absolute criterion, but only near 
the limits of the knowledge possessed by each generation. 
Science has extended the line entirely beyond ordinary 
mental vision, not by introducing any new theory of nature, 
but by extending the boundaries of exadt knowledge, and 
with them, of the field in which, by common consent, final 
causes do not admit of being traced. The telescope has 
revealed to us a universe compared with which that known 
to ancients is but an atom, and geology has opened up to 
our view a vista of ages in which the lifetime of our genera- 
tion is hardly more than a moment. And thus final causes 
have taken their flight from a vast region in which they 
before lay hid in obscurity. You may now ask, have they 
simply taken refuge in the more distant but vastly wider 
circumference which now marks . the boundaries of our 
knowledge, or are we to suppose them entirely banished from 
nature ? This is entirely a question of intuition, and not at 
all of scientific investigation. I have described the scientific 
theory of nature as not admitting scrutable final causes at 
all, but as claiming that the law of the falling rock is sym- 
bolic of all her operations. But I think this is a view towards 
which philosophers have always inclined. We must always 
expect that men will incline to this view in proportion to 
their familiarity with the material side of nature. At the 
same time it is evident to all that there must have been a 
beginning of things, and that nature could not have com- 
menced herself. We have, therefore, a wide belt left be- 
tween the origin of nature and the boundaries of our know- 
ledge in which we may suppose the inscrutable cause to 
have adted. Here we reach questions of philosophy which 
lie outside of our field, and which, therefore, we cannot now 
stop to consider. 
The exadt bearing of the subjedl will be better understood 
by condensing what has already been said so as to present 
the whole in a brief space. 
