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108 its adherents maintain that, beset with difficulties as it is, though not more so than others, it has yet this merit, that it leaves a way open to speculative thought, alike removed from the vagaries of mere ontological abstraction and the entire subjection of mind to a muddy and brute extraction. They might add, also, that this theory shows that, in the interpretation of the serial progress of being, we are not altogether shut up to a choice between specific and spasmodic creations and his own theory of evolution, as Mr. Spencer triumphantly assumes throughout his argument. Indeed, nothing is more easy than to make theories; but the difficulty is to get them adopted into Nature as the satisfactory reason of her processes. But, until they are so adopted, they are no more than the scaffolding of science—by no means the completed structure. Now, have the Darwinian and the Spencerian hypotheses been so adopted? Can we say that any questions on which such cautious observers and life-long students as Darwin, Owen, Huxley, Wallace, and Agassiz, still debate, are settled questions? Prof. Tyndall, for example, says: "Darwin draws heavily upon the scientific tolerance of the age;" and again, that "those who hold the doctrine of evolution are by no means ignorant of the uncertainty of their data, and they yield no more to it than a provisional assent." With what propriety, then, can a merely provisional conclusion be erected into an assured stand-point whence to assail traditionary beliefs as if they were old wives' fables?

More than that, a theory may be far more advanced than any of those; may be able to account satisfactorily for all the phenomena within its reach, as the Ptolemaic theory of the sidereal appearances did, even to the prediction of eclipses, or as the emanation theory of light did, up to the time of Dr. Young, and yet turn out altogether baseless. Nature is a prodigious quantity and a prodigious force; with all her outward uniformities she is often more cunning than the Sphinx; and, like Emerson's Brahma, she may declare to her students—

We have looked into her face a little, measured some of her ellipses and angles, weighed her gases and dusts, and unveiled certain forces, far and near—all which are glorious things to have done, and some of them seemingly miraculous; but we are still only in her outer courts. Humboldt's "Cosmos," written thirty years ago, is said to be already an antiquated book; and Comte, who died but lately, and whom these eyes of mine have seen, could hardly pass a college examination in the sciences he was supposed to have classified forever. Let us not be too confident, then, that our little systems of natural law will not, like other systems of thought spoken of by Tennyson, "have their day."

The other distinction I had in mind, in my speech, was that, while there are some problems accessible to scientific methods, there are others that are not; and, that any proffered scientific solution of the latter, either negative or affirmative, is most likely an imposition. What I meant was that science, according to its own confession, that is, according to the teachings of its most accredited organs, pretends to no other function than to the ascertainment of the actual phenomena of Nature and their constant relations. The sphere of the finite and the relative, i. e., of existence, not of essence, and of existence in its mutual and manifested dependencies in time and space, not in its absolute grounds, circumscribes and exhausts its jurisdiction. Was I wrongly taught, Mr. Editor? Does science assert for itself higher and broader pretensions? Does it propose to penetrate the supernatural or metaphysical realms, if there be any such? Does it intend to apply its instruments to the measurement of the infinite, and its crucibles to the decomposition of the absolute?

You, as a man of excellent sense, will promptly answer, No! But, then, I ask, is thought, whose expatiations are so restless and irrepressible, to be forever shut up to the phenomenal and relative? Is it to be forever stifled under a bushel-measure, or tied by the legs with a surveyor's chain? May it not make excursions into the field of the Probable, and solace itself with moral assurances when physical certainties fail? May it not, mounting the winged horse of analogy, when the good old drudge-horse induction gives out, fly through tracts of