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“ A primrose by the river’s brim 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more.” 
8. But, although such a view of the world around us differs 
little, probably not at all except in degree, from that of 
animals, yet we cannot, without undermining the foundations 
both of all knowledge and of all morality, treat this sense- view 
as in itself unreal, or consider the forms and phenomena of the 
universe to be illusions. These phenomena, indeed, when 
tested by reason, are found to be the effects of causes often- 
times totally different from the interpretation put on them by 
the senses ; the colour of an object, for example, as it appears 
to the eye, and the particular vibrations of the ether which 
produce the sensation of that colour, are so different in kind 
that the mind can trace no connection or analogy between 
them. Yet the one is as truly a reality as the other, and as 
certainly the work of the Creator. It is the mere pedantry of 
science to condemn as untrue popular language, the language 
of the senses ; as if those things which science regards as 
realities were anything else than effects of yet higher causes, 
such as doubtless would be found, could we comprehend them, 
to differ as widely from the conceptions of science as these do 
from our immediate perception of the phenomena. 
9. (II.) Again, it requires but little consideration to discover 
that the second, or next in order from the lowest mode of 
viewing all created existence, is that to which our logical 
faculty, and reason (in a limited sense of the word) directs us ; 
in which the universe is regarded as the outcome of law, and 
of orderly sequences of cause and effect. This view, in refer- 
ence to the material universe, is that of physical science, tho 
office of which is to investigate the laws according to which 
the sequences of natural phenomena are governed. Such, 
though by no means so accurately defined, or so logically 
determined, as it has become in modern times, was the idea 
which in the ancient Greek philosophy was involved in the 
word (pvtrig , the notion in this, as in the Latin natura , being 
that of a generative and productive power expressing itself, 
according to some primordial law, in the forms and phenomena 
of the Universe. In conformity with this idea, modern scienco, 
as its horizon extends, aims not only at discovering tho imme- 
diate antecedent of each phenomenon, but also at proving tlioso 
various antecedents to bo results of some common cause, and 
thus representing the various energies of nature as only different 
forms of the same universal energy, and tho apparently diverse 
or even conflicting laws, as all dependent on one common law. 
