given us the very term to characterize this phenomenon. 
“ Wood and coal can burn ; whence come their heat, and the 
work producible by that heat? From the immeasurable 
reservoir of the sun, Nature has proposed to herself the task 
of storing up the light which streams earthward from the 
sun, and of casting into a permanent form the most fugitive 
of all powers. To this end she has overspread the earth with 
organisms which, while living, take in the solar light, and by 
its consumption generate forces of another kind. These 
organisms ai'e plants. The vegetable world indeed constitutes 
the instrument whereby the wave-motion of the sun is changed 
into the rigid form of chemical tension, and thus prepared for 
future use. With this 'prevision the existence of the human 
race itself is inseparably connected.” In the terms which I 
have italicised, Teleology is so etherealized that nothing re- 
mains of the grossness of the old conception of the mechanism 
of the universe. Prevision is so much finer than design or 
contrivance ! We no longer require to see either the watch 
or the world in the process of making ; we no longer hear the 
starting of the machinery; but as in EzekieTs vision there is 
a spirit of life within the wheels, and they are borne on 
mighty wings. 
The objection to this illustration, that if coal were intended 
for the use of man, it should have been evenly distributed 
over the globe, and upon the surface, seems too frivolous for a 
philosophical reply. But the reply is given in the whole 
nature of man, and in the totality of the ends of his exist- 
ence. Man shall not live by coal alone. The distribution of 
the earth’s products gives rise to that system of industries, to 
that development of energy, skill, foresight, and invention, 
and to that brotherhood of humanity which comes of wide- 
spread intercourse, which render human existence so much 
higher than that of brutes. 
I am not strenuous, however, for this illustration. I have 
adopted it because a leading man of science seems driven to 
teleology to account for the fact of coal. Thus teleology, as 
in Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, is often 
the guide of science to higher ends. 
My object in this essay is not to prove the doctrine of final 
causes, but to point out the lines of proof ; in the true con- 
ception of causality, and in the wise interpretation of those 
more subtle phases of Nature which science now deals with, 
and which so transcend the mechanical causes of Paley. 
As with heat, so with light. To describe the web of 
relations subsisting between solar light and the media through 
which this passes to the human eye, Tyndall has recourse to 
the same refinement of teleology. 
“ We have, in the first place, in solar light an agent of 
