33 
times, but the question, as a whole, is not within the range 
of exact science.* Clerk Maxwell succeeded in tracing a con- 
nection between some of the empirical generalisations of 
chemistry and the laws of the conservation and dissipation of 
energy. But it is evident that nothing short of the absolute 
stability of chemical structures, which would be fatal not only 
to all life, but to all the variety of Nature, could make sequences 
of cause and effect in physical phenomena on this globe, in all 
cases or even generally, determinable. And this consideration 
leads to the remarkable conclusion that, whilst Science is com- 
pelled to postulate both order and causation for its investiga- 
tions, it never can possess the power, in many of the pheno- 
mena of Nature, to prove that the order is due to the causa- 
tion ; for the results of the causation, instead of being definite 
and orderly, are, so far as we can understand them, and to an 
extent apparently undefinable, quite indeterminate. And yet 
Science would contradict itself, and, in fact, could have no 
foundation, if the order and the causation had not some 
common basis. One Divine Reason, underlying at the same 
time the order and the causations, can alone supply a sufficient 
basis for both. 
25. I would call attention, in passing, to the confirmation 
of this truth, of Reason being the basis of the whole system 
of the universe, that is afforded by the view of causation which 
we have been considering. Science, at all events at present, 
can give no explanation of the comparative stability and in- 
stability of the different constituents of the material universe ; 
and yet on this the order of Nature very largely depends. 
If the arrangements of the energies in the chemical com- 
bination of hydrogen and oxygen in water, for example, or in 
carbonic acid gas, which supplies food to plants, were less or 
more stable than they are, or if the atmosphere were a 
chemical combination at all, stable or unstable, the present 
system of organic life would be impossible. It is, indeed, 
with reference to organic life that the considerations I have 
suggested are of most importance. The relation of living 
matter to physical energies is one, all must allow, of in- 
superable difficulty. Living matter has powers of adopting, 
transforming, directing, and applying, those energies which 
are not only quite unintelligible to us, but which have no 
parallel in dead matter. Our knowledge of this fact is, how- 
ever, not scientific knowledge. It is a fact of which it is 
* See paper on “ Chemical Equilibrium,” by M. M. Pattison Muir, 
Nature , April 1, 1880). 
VOL. XV. 
D 
