Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/84

 manifested in the Creation," the writers to be selected by the President of the Royal Society. He, acting with certain bishops, selected eight authors, assigned to each a portion of the subject with an honorarium of £1250. Babbage was not one of the number, but in 1837, after the eight treatises had appeared, he published a volume entitled The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. In design the book is grand and much superior to the regular treatises, but in execution it is like many others of Babbage's works, a magnificent torso. He was moved to write the book by a chapter in Whewell's Bridgewater volume where it is maintained that long application to mathematical and physical reasoning disqualifies the mind from duly appreciating the force of that kind of reasoning which alone can be adduced in favor of Natural Theology. Babbage thought that such reasoning tended to promote the prejudice that the pursuits of exact science are unfavorable to religion; he shows on the contrary that his pursuits had led him to new views of the truths of Natural Theology.

The most remarkable part of Babbage's book is where he takes up Hume's conception of a law of nature, and the consequences as to miracles which he deduced from it. According to Hume cause and effect are nothing more than invariable sequence; and a law of nature rests upon experience or repeated observation just as the reliability of.a witness does. Babbage points to his Difference Engine (that is, the part completed) and remarks that it may be adjusted to produce the natural numbers. He asks a supposed observer how often a natural number must be produced to infer that this is the whole law of the machine; one hundred times? one thousand times? one million times? Babbage answers that according to the constitution and given adjustment of the machine it will produce the natural number up to 1,000,001; but after that it will give the triangular numbers and that after 2761 turns a further complexity will be introduced. These additional complexities are necessary consequences of the nature and given adjustment of the machine; and no amount of mere induction from given instances could detect the inner necessary connection. Hence casual connection