Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/165

Rh identity is not proved; the analogy alone is apparent. In the physical sphere science often recognizes the same laws appearing under widely different conditions. For instance, the process by which animal life is kept up is no doubt a real combustion, identical in kind with that which takes place in the consumption of fuel by fire. Lavoisier and Laplace long ago taught us that there are not two chemistries—one for dead bodies and another for living—on the contrary, one system of laws, chemical, mechanical, physical, everywhere prevail. Again, there are few exact terms that we apply to objective nature that we do not apply upon the principle of analogy to subjective nature, as high and low, interior and exterior, flexible and inflexible, hard and soft, attraction and repulsion, etc. Indeed, our whole language, in its higher ranges, is a perpetual application of the principle of analogy. But to aver that physical laws are operative in the spiritual world, even in the spiritual world of Calvinistic theology, is quite another matter, and is to take a leap where science can not follow. Hard and inflexible as the Calvinistic heaven is, it is doubtful if the law of gravitation reaches so far, though our professor does not flinch at all at this assumption (see page 42).

"Nature," he again says, "is not a mere image or emblem of the spiritual. It is a working model of the spiritual. In the spiritual world the same wheels revolve, but without the iron" (page 27). It is something to be assured that the iron is left out; the wheels are enough. Though why not the iron also, since we are still within reach of the same physical laws?

There is nothing more taking than the argument from analogy, but probably no species of reasoning opens so wide a door for the admission of error. It is often a powerful instrument in leading and persuading the mind, because it awakens the fancy or stirs the imagination; but its real scientific value, or its value as an instrument for the discovery of truth, is very little, if it has any at all. The fact of the metamorphosis of the caterpillar after an apparent death into a winged insect may lend plausibility to the doctrine of the soul's immortality, but can it be said to furnish one iota of proof? Indeed, to a mind bent upon anything like scientific certitude in such matters, Butler's whole argument for a future life can hardly be of a feather's weight, because he seeks to prove by reason or comparison that which experience alone can settle.

Paul reasoned from analogy when he sought to prove the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. He appealed to a perfectly natural and familiar phenomenon, namely, the decay and transformation of a kernel of wheat in the ground before it gives birth to the stalk and the new grain. But see how the doctrine which he maintained so eloquently has faded, or is fading, from the mind of even orthodox Christendom! Analogy is valuable as rhetoric, but in the serious pursuit of truth it can be of little service to us. When employed for its