(Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, p. 37.) "We would no way be understood to deny the constant exercise of His direct power in maintaining the system of nature; or the ultimate emanation, of every energy which material agents exert, from his immediate will, acting in conformity with his own laws." And the Bishop of London, in a note to his "Sermon on the duty of combining religious instruction with intellectual culture," observes, "the student in natural philosophy will find rest from all those perplexities which are occasioned by the obscurity of causation, in the supposition, which although it was discredited by the patronage of Malebranche and the Cartesians, has been adopted by Clarke and Dugald Stewart, and which is by far the most simple and sublime account of the matter; that all the events which are continually taking place in the different parts of the material universe, are the immediate effects of the divine agency."

CHAPTER IX.

On the Impression produced by considering the Nature and Prospects of Science; or, on the Impossibility of the Progress of our Knowledge ever enabling us to comprehend the Nature of the Deity.

If we were to stop at the view presented in the last chapter, it might be supposed that--by considering God as eternal and omnipresent, conscious of all the relations, and of all the objects of the universe, instituting laws founded on the contemplation of these relations, and carrying these laws into effect by his immediate energy, -we had attained to a conception, in some degree definite, of the Deity, such as natural philosophy leads us to conceive him. But by resting in this mode of conception, we should overlook, or at least should disconnect from our philosophical doctrines, all that most interests and affects us in the character of the Creator and Preserver of the world;-namely, that he is the lawgiver and judge of our actions; the proper object of our prayer and adoration; the source from which we may hope for moral strength here, and for the reward of our obedi

ence and the elevation of our nature in another state of existence.

We are very far from believing that our philosophy alone can give us such assurance of these important truths as is requisite for our guidance and support; but we think that even our physical philosophy will point out to us the necessity of proceeding far beyond that conception of God, which represents him merely as the mind in which reside all the contrivance, law, and energy of the material world. We believe that the view of the universe which modern science has already opened to us, compared with the prospect of what she has still to do in pursuing the path on which she has just entered, will show us how immeasurably inadequate such a mode of conception would be: and that if we take into our account, as we must in reason do, all that of which we have knowledge and consciousness, and of which we have as yet no systematic science, we shall be led to a conviction that the Creator and Preserver of the material world must also contain in him such properties and attributes as imply his moral character, and as fall in most consistently with all that we learn in any other way of his providence and holiness, his justice and mercy.

1. The sciences which have at present acquired any considerable degree of completeness, are those in which an extensive and varied collection of phenomena, and their proximate causes, have

been reduced to a few simple general laws. Such are Astronomy and Mechanics, and perhaps, so far as its physical conditions are concerned, Optics. Other portions of human knowledge can be considered as perfect sciences, in any strict sense of the term, only when they have assumed this form; when the various appearances which they involve are reduced to a few principles, such as the laws of motion and the mechanical properties of the luminiferous ether. If we could trace the endless varieties of the forms of crystals, and the complicated results of chemical composition, to some one comprehensive law necessarily pointing out the crystalline form of any given chemical compound, Mineralogy would become an exact science. As yet, however, we can scarcely boast of the existence of any other such sciences than those which we at first mentioned and so far therefore as we attempt to give definiteness to our conception of the Deity, by considering him as the intelligent depositary and executor of laws of nature, we can subordinate to such a mode of conception no portion of the creation, save the mechanical movements of the universe, and the propagation and properties of light.

2. And if we attempt to argue concerning the nature of the laws and relations which govern those provinces of creation whither our science has not yet reached, by applying some analogy borrowed from cases where it has been successful,

we have no chance of obtaining any except the most erroneous and worthless guesses. The history of human speculations, as well as the nature of the objects of them, shows how certainly this must happen. The great generalizations which have been established in one department of our knowledge, have been applied in vain to the purpose of throwing light on the other portions which still continue in obscurity. When the Newtonian philosophy had explained so many mechanical facts, by the two great steps,-of resolving the action of a whole mass into the actions of its minutest particles, and considering these particles as centres of force, attempts were naturally soon made to apply the same mode of explanation to facts of other different kinds. It was conceived that the whole of natural philosophy must consist in investigating the laws of force by which particles of different substances attracted and repelled, and thus produced motions, or vibrations to and from the particles. Yet what were the next great discoveries in physics? The action of a galvanic wire upon a magnet; which is not to attract or repel it, but to turn it to the right and left; to produce motion, not to or from, but transverse to the line drawn to the acting particles; and again, the undulatory theory of light, in which it appeared that the undulations must not be longitudinal, as all philosophers, following the