by law by no means favors the agnostic view. The laws of nature are merely mental generalizations of our own, and, so far as they go, show a remarkable harmony between our mental nature and that manifested in the universe. They are not themselves powers capable of producing effects, but merely express what we can ascertain of uniformity of action in nature. The law of gravitation, for example, gives no clew to the origin of that force, but merely expresses its constant mode of action, in whatever way that may have been determined at first. Nor are natural laws decrees of necessity. They might have been otherwise—nay, many of them may be otherwise in parts of the universe inaccessible to us, or they may change in process of time; for the period over which our knowledge extends may be to the plans of the Creator like the lifetime of some minute insect which might imagine human arrangements of no great permanence to be of eternal duration.

Unless the laws of nature were constant, in so far as our experience extends, we could have no certain basis either for science or for practical life. All would be capricious and uncertain, and we could calculate on nothing. Law thus adapts the universe to be the residence of rational beings, and nothing else could. Viewed in this way, we see that natural laws must be, in their relation to a Creator, voluntary limitations of his power in certain directions for the benefit of his creatures. To secure this end, nature must be a perfect machine, all the parts of which are adjusted for permanent and harmonious action. It may perhaps rather be compared to a vast series of machines, each running independently like the trains on a railway, but all connected and regulated by an invisible guidance which determines the time and the distance of each, and the manner in which the less urgent and less important shall give place to others. Even this does not express the whole truth; for the harmony of nature must be connected with constant change and progress toward higher perfection. Does this conception of natural law give us any warrant for the idea that the universe is a product of chance? Is it not the highest realization of all that we can conceive of the plans of superhuman intelligence?

The stupid notion—still lingering in certain quarters—that when anything has been referred to a natural law or to a secondary cause under law, God may be dispensed with in relation to that thing, is merely a survival of the superstition that divine action must be of the nature of a capricious interference. The true theistic conception of law is that already stated, of a voluntary limitation of divine power in the interest of a material cosmos and its intelligent inhabitants. Nor is the permanence of law dependent on necessity or on mere mechanical routine, but on the unchanging will of the Legislator; while the countless varieties and vicissitudes of nature depend, not on caprice or on accidental interference, but on the interactions and adjustments of laws of different grades, and so numerous and varied in their scope and application and in the combinations of which they are capable that it is often impossible for finite minds to calculate their results.

If, now, in conclusion, we are asked to sum up the hypotheses as to the origin of natural laws and of the properties and determinations of matter and force, we may do this under the following heads:

1. Absolute creation by the will of a Supreme Intelligence, self-existent and omnipotent. This may be the ultimate fact lying behind all materials, forces, and laws known to science.

2. Mediate creation, or the making of new complex products with material already created and under laws previously existing. This is applicable not so much to the primary origin of things as to their subsequent determinations and modifications.

3. Both of the above may be included under the expression "creation by law," implying the institution from the first of fixed laws or modes of action not to be subsequently deviated from.

4. Theistic evolution, or the gradual development of the divine plans by the apparently spontaneous interaction of things made. This is universally admitted to occur in the minor modifications of created things, though of course it can have no place as a mode of explaining actual origins, and it must be limited within the laws of nature established by the Creator. Practically, it might be difficult to make any sharp distinctions between such evolution and mediate creation.

5. Agnostic and monistic evolution, which hold the spontaneous origination and differentiation of things out of primitive matter and force, self-existent or fortuitous. The monistic form of this hypothesis assumes one primary substance or existence potentially embracing all subsequent developments.

These theories are, of course, not all antagonistic to one another. They resolve themselves into two groups, a theistic and an atheistic. The former includes the first four; the latter, the fifth. Any one who believes in God may suppose a primary creation of matter and energy, a subsequent moulding and fashioning of them mediately and under natural law, and also a gradual evolution of many new things by the interaction of things previously made. This complex idea of the origin of things seems, indeed, to be the rational outcome of Theism. It is also the idea which underlies the old record in the book of Genesis, where we have first an absolute creation, and then a series of "makings" and "placings," and of things "bringing forth" other things, in the course of the creative periods.

On the other hand, Agnosticism postulates primary force or forces self-existent and including potentially all that is subsequently evolved from them. The only way in which it approximates to theism is in its extreme monistic form, where the one force or power supposed to underlie all existence is a sort of God shorn of personality, will, and reason.

The actual relations of these opposing theories to science cannot be better explained than by a reference to the words of a leading monist, whose views we shall have to notice in the next lecture. "If," says Haeckel, "anybody feels the necessity of representing the origin of matter as the work of a supernatural creative force independent of matter itself, I would remind him that the idea of an immaterial force creating matter in the first instance is an article of faith which has nothing to do with science. Where faith begins, science ends."

Precisely so, if only we invert the last sentence and say, "Where science ends, faith begins." It is only by faith that we know of any force, or even of the atoms of matter themselves, and in like manner it is "by faith we know that the creative ages have been constituted by the word of God."[1] The only difference is that the monist has faith in the potency of nothing to produce something, or of something material to exist for ever and to acquire at some point of time the power spontaneously to enter on the process of development; while the theist has faith in a primary intelligent Will as the Author of all things. The latter has this to confirm his faith—that it accords with what we know of the inertia of matter, of the constancy of forces, and of the permanence of natural law, and is in harmony with the powers of the one free energy we know—that of the human will.