Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/837

Rh experience alone. Now, how do we Catholics, who have a philosophy the value of which we imagine that you believers in Spencer and Mill and Bain greatly underrate, account for the uniformity of Nature without trenching in any way on the supernatural basis of that Nature? I will show you. Aquinas says in his "Summa"—and the Archbishop, of course, pronounced his Latin in the Continental manner—"Tota irrationalis natura comparatur ad Deum sicut instrumentum ad agens principale"—the whole of inanimate and irrational Nature bears to the Divine being the relation of an instrument to the principal agent. That is to say, the Divine intellect conceives the law which the Divine will sanctions and enforces by a great methodical instrument. The natura naturans makes use of the natura naturata. The law determines the instrument it is to use, and the instrument it is to use determines the world. Why, then, should the law be regular and not variable? Why, because it is the instrument of a being who is not variable. The schoolmen tell us that Nature has an appetite, a desire to accomplish its ends. They say of Nature "appetit," "desiderat." Such are the phrases they use. And as no constant aim, no true development can be attained by capricious, inconsistent, inconsequent action, by instruments incoherent, part with part—for the gratification of Nature's appetite, for the fulfillment of her desire, and the attainment of her purpose, a constancy and fixity of method are essential which are never interrupted, save where the Divine power modifies the instrument for its own good purpose. Thus the uniformity of Nature is based upon the wisdom of God, and the wisdom of God is manifested in the uniformity of Nature. St. Thomas has said, "Proprium est naturæ rationalis ut tendat in finem quasi se agens et ducens ad finem." And again: "Necessitas naturalis inhærens rebus, quâ determinantur ad unum, est impressio quædam Dei dirigentis ad finem, sicut necessitas quâ sagitta agitur ut ad certum signum tendat, est impressio sagittantis et non sagittæ"; that is, the necessity, or may we not say the uniformity of Nature, is a career impressed upon it by the Divine archer, who never misses his mark; it is not the arrow which determines that career, but the archer who points and who dismisses the arrow in its flight. But St. Thomas goes on: "Sed in hoc differt, quod id quod creaturæ a Deo recipiunt est earum natura, quod autem ab homine rebus naturalibus imprimitur præter earum naturam ad violentiam pertinet." Dr. Ward will correct me if I am wrong, but I interpret this as meaning that if what men ingraft on lower creatures is spoken of by the angelic doctor as doing them a certain violence, altering, I suppose, their mere involuntary qualities by infecting them with a certain human purposiveness not their own, how much more is it evidently open to the Divine purpose to ingraft on this uniformity of Nature a supernatural bent of its own, to open it, as it were, to the power of miracle, to infuse it with the significance of revelation!