ture which we call "laws," we are led to the conclusion that they are human conceptions subject to human fallibility, and that they may or may not express the ideas of the Great Author of Nature. To set up these laws as self-acting, and as either excluding or rendering unnecessary the power which alone can give them effect, appears to me as arrogant as it is unphilosophical. To speak of any law as "regulating" or "governing" phenomena is only permissible on the assumption that the law is the expression of the modus operandi of a governing power. I was once in a great city which for two days was in the hands of a lawless mob. Magisterial authority was suspended by timidity and doubt; the force at its command was paralyzed by want of resolute direction. The "laws" were on the statute-book, but there was no power to enforce them. And so the powers of evil did their terrible work, and fire and rapine continued to destroy life and property without check, until new power came in, when the reign of law was restored.
And thus we are led to the culminating point of man's intellectual interpretation of Nature—his recognition of the unity of the power of which her phenomena are the diversified manifestations. Toward this point all scientific inquiry now tends. The convertibility of the physical forces, the correlation of these with the vital, and the intimacy of that nexus between mental and bodily activity which, explain it as we may, cannot be denied, all lead upward toward one and the same conclusion; and the pyramid of which the philosophical conclusion is the apex has its foundation in the primitive instincts of humanity.
By our own remote progenitors, as by the untutored savage of the present day, every change in which human agency was not apparent was referred to a particular animating intelligence. And thus they attributed not only the movements of the heavenly bodies, but all the phenomena of Nature, each to its own deity. These deities were invested with more than human power; but they were also supposed capable of human passions and subject to human capriciousness. As the uniformities of Nature came to be more distinctly recognized, some of these deities were invested with a dominant control, while others were supposed to be their subordinate ministers. A serene majesty was attributed to the greater gods who sit above the clouds; while their inferiors might "come down to earth in the likeness of men." With the growth of the scientific study of Nature, the conception of its harmony and unity gained ever-increasing strength. And so, among the most enlightened of the Greek and Roman philosophers, we find a distinct recognition of the idea of the unity of the directing mind from which the order of Nature proceeds; for they obviously believed that, as our modern poet has expressed it—
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the Soul."
