Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/119

Rh space and time, not yet laid down on the map? May not some men have insights into the working of laws yet unexplored, such as Mozart had into the laws of music, and Shakespeare into the laws of the human heart? Assuredly you cannot say nay, in the name of science, which, as we agree, being confined to the phenomenal and relative, has no right to pronounce either one way or the other, as to what, by supposition, lies beyond the phenomenal and relative. That supposed beyond may be wholly chimerical; but it is not from science that we shall learn the fact, if it be a fact. In other words, I contend—and here I hit upon the prime fallacy of many soi-disant scientists—that science has no right to erect what it does contain into a negation of everything which it does not contain. Still less has it a right to decide questions out of its confessed province, because it cannot reach them by its peculiar methods, or subject them to its peculiar tests?

Fortunately for me, though you take me especially to task for it, I am sustained in this position by some of the most eminent men of science of the day, and I may say, by great numbers of them, as I have reason to know. You yourself published, only a little while since, Dr. Carpenter's address, as President, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in which, after expounding very clearly man's rightful function as "the interpreter of Nature," he said: "The science of modern times, however, has taken a more special direction. Fixing its attention exclusively on the order of Nature, it has separated itself wholly from theology, whose function it is to seek after its cause..... But, when science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place of theology and sets up its own conception of the order of Nature as a sufficient account of its cause, it is invading a province of thought to which it has no claim, and not unreasonably provokes the hostility of those who ought to be its best friends."

In the same number you published Dr. Gray's address, as President of the American Association, wherein, after quoting Miss Cobbe's remark, that "it is a singular fact, that when we find out how any thing is done, our first conclusion is, that God did not do it," he adds, that such a conclusion is "premature, unworthy, and deplorable," and concludes with the hope "that, in the future, even more than in the past, faith in an order which is the basis of science will not (as it cannot be reasonably) be dissevered from faith in an ordainer which is the basis of religion." And, my old friend, and honored teacher, Dr. Henry, from whose enthusiasm for natural studies I imbibed whatever taste for them I have retained, in a letter addressed to this Tyndall banquet, and published in your last number, wrote: "While we have endeavored to show that abstract science is entitled to high appreciation and liberal support, we do not claim for it the power of solving questions belonging to other realms of thought. . . . Much harm has been done by the antagonism which has sometimes arisen between the expounders of science on the one hand, and those of theology on the other, and we would deprecate the tendency which exhibits itself in certain minds to foster feelings antagonistic to the researches into the phenomena of Nature, for fear they should disprove the interpretations of Holy Writ made long before the revelations of physical science, which might serve for a better exegesis of what has been revealed; and also the tendency in other minds to transcend the known, and to pronounce dogmatically as to the possibility of modes of existence on which physical research has not thrown, and we think never can throw, positive light." Now, here is precisely, though not all, my meaning, and yet you rap me over the knuckles for it, while you publish the praises of Carpenter, Gray, and Henry.

All these illustrious men admit the limits of Science, and also the possibility of passing beyond them. As men of good common-sense, and no less as philosophers and scientists, they are perfectly aware that, while the scope of Science lies within the contents of experience, and of the inductions drawn from that experience, it is hazarding the character of it to go further. They feel too, no doubt, what I certainly do, that there are certain broad, deep, ineradicable instincts of the human mind, which, however they originated, whether implanted there by creative act, or formed by the slow growth of thousands of years, are now become the inexpugnable basis of