been tested by observation, or can ever henceforth be tested by observation. What physicist stood by and saw the glowing gas condense into sun and planets? What savant watched the annulosa develop the primordial vertebrate; the amphibia the mammal; the mammal the man? What man of to-day looked on the dry land uniting England with France, or the seas that once covered Wales, the Netherlands, or the larger part of Russia? What scientific enchanter holds the wand that can roll back the wheel of Time to those long-passed epochs? or what experimenter is so mighty as to be able to reproduce all those vanished conditions of the universe which gave birth to its primæval phenomena? The only verification possible in any of these great departments is to show that the cause assigned, according to present laws of causation, would account for the phenoNot that they did cause them, nor that the laws of causation have come down unchanged, nor even that no other cause could have produced the given effects, The same is true of those important scientific theories, the atomic constitution of chemical substances and the ether-waves, which are regarded universally as the

mena.

which admits of no reasonable doubt, but it is an unverifiable hypothesis. I may be as sure as I can be of anything that I had a thought, yesterday morning, which I took care neither to utter nor to write down, but my conviction is an utterly unverifiable hypothesis. So that unverified and even unverifiable hypotheses may be great aids to the progress of knowledge, may have a right to be believed with a high degree of assurance. (See article, "Darwin and Haeckel," p. 596, POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, March, 1875.) "The domain in which this motion of light is carried on," says Tyndall, "lies entirely beyond the reach of our senses.

The

vehicle of light. No verification by any kind of observation is possible.* For the most powerful microscope has never discerned a molecule or an atom. They are at least a thousand times smaller, according to Thomson's calculations, than any particle which the microscope can discern. They are as pure assumptions as the vortices of Descartes, or the emitted corpuscles of Newton's theory of light. All the verification that can be given is to show, in the phrase which Tyndall so frequently uses, in his paper on the "Scientific Imagination," that the phenomena occur as if there were such substrata. There is nothing to prove that they are actually there, or that some other better explanation may not be discovered and banish them, as the belief in emitted corpuscles and imponderable fluids has already been dismissed.

So, again, the truths of geometry, the doctrines of the indestructibility of matter and force, and the uniformity of Nature, all laws claiming universality and absoluteness, as it was before shown that they could not be proved by observation, so neither can they be verified by experience, that is, in their universality and absoluteness. Their only verification is approximative and probable.

Thus is it shown by examination that Science, when she would grasp any of the wider laws and deeper secrets of Nature, must and does employ the very methods for

waves of light require a medium for their formation and propagation, but we cannot see, or feel, or taste, or smell this medium."(Tyndall's "Fragments of Science," p. 214.)

* "It is not pretended that the existence of atoms has been or can be proved or disproved.”—(Presidential Address of Prof. Lovering before the American Association at Hartford, 1874.)

which Religion is rejected, and is open to the same objections. If the one is not to be rejected or doubted because of these, why is the other? If the physicist may rely upon man's natural faith in an external reality, and in the practical veracity of his physical senses, why may not the spiritualist rely upon the same natural faith of mankind, when it declares the inward reality of the soul and the veracity of moral and spiritual discernment? If the scientific world accepts the belief in the indestructibility of force as an ultimate belief not to be questioned, why may not the religious world legitimately receive the natural belief of man in the immortality of the soul as a similar ultimate belief, not to be distrusted? If the student of Nature customarily receives the word of a Newton, a Laplace, or a Tyndall, as presumably to be trusted, even when declaring that which he cannot fully understand, why may not the Christian disciple accept the authority of a superior spiritual discerner, like Jesus Christ, with a similar confidence? If the optician may lawfully deduce from the phenomena of light which he studies the hypothesis of an invisible, infinite ether, why may not the theist, with equal justification, infer from the kosmic phenomena which he studies the hypothesis of an invisible, infinite Creator and Guardian; and if the one hypothesis is not to be declared a mere figment of the scientific fancy "* because it cannot be directly verified by sense-perception, why is the other to be regarded as a figment of the religious imagination, merely because it lacks the same kind of sense-demonstration?

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* Tyndall's "Fragments of Science," p. 133.

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CHAPTER V.

FAITHS OF SCIENCE-AIMS AND OBJECTS.

THUS it is seen that science rests on the same grounds and employs the same methods which its champions have censured religion for using.

But perhaps it will be said that, although science and religion have no really different grounds or methods, yet the different objects to which they are applied in each case justify men in refusing to the propositions of theology the same credit that they give to those of physical inquiry. There is certainly an apparent difference of this kind, seeming to many very real and broad, which ought not to be omitted from any thorough discussion of this subject. An opponent of religion would put it something like this

Religion, perhaps, may employ the same instrumentalities as science, but the trouble is, she aims to master with them truths which they are not competent to grasp. Science deals with material masses, their relations of heat, colour, weight, and their changes of form, bulk, place, quality, &c.-all of them things visible and tangible.

The endeavour of religion, however, is to establish

the existence, nature, and relations of immaterial beings, called spirits; a Supreme Spirit behind and above all Nature, and minor spirits within each human body— things which no sense can ever discern.

Science attends to phenomena, their co-existences and successions. It busies itself about those things only of which there is or can be experience. Religion aspires to go behind the empirical to the metempirical. It talks of ideal conceptions and supersensual objects.

Science, again, limits itself to the aspects of things in their relations to us, under the limitations of earthly life, and as they may be clearly comprehended by us. Religion, on the contrary, dreams of the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal, and loses itself in the mazes of the contradictory and the inconceivable. Behold in this difference of aims and objects the ample justification of the modern suspicions of religion. Immaterial Spirit, First Cause, Eternal, Infinite, Absolute-how can such things ever be known? What finger ever touched them, what optic or auditory nerve ever gave report of them, what telescope was ever made, or can ever be made so spacepenetrating, what microscope so delicate in its scrutiny as to discern objects of this nature? "They are," says Büchner, "arbitrary assumptions without any real basis." "Human thought and human knowledge," he maintains, are "incapable of discovering or knowing anything supersensual." "The materialist," says Virchow, "can never be satisfied with it: he knows only bodies and their qualities; what is beyond he terms transcendental, and

"Force and Matter," p. xli., Introduction.