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502 view of the nature of the surrounding world. And it well illustrates the three phases of opinion to which we have referred, for there was first a long unanimity of ignorance, then a stormy and obnoxious conflict, and this has led to a new and more intelligent basis of agreement. But, while there is a virtual accord among our writers as to the doctrine itself, they disagree radically as to its interpretations, and show us that there must be a good deal of warm work yet before old beliefs are brought into consistency with the new theory. The writer in the Penn Monthly refuses to modify his notions about breaks and new beginnings in the order of things. He says: "If there be one word more intolerable than another to science, it is beginning. To disprove supposed beginnings, to show that they were the outcome of what went before, is the scientist's vocation. The category of cause and effect becomes, through long practice, his first law of thought, the groove of all his mental operations. With whatever fact he is brought face to face, his first impulse is to apply that category 'to account for the fact,' as he calls the process. And when he speaks of causes he comes to mean only secondary causes, those that are themselves effects. On the other hand, this word beginning seems to us to embrace in it all that the metaphysician, the theist, and the Christian, have to fight for against the naturalist." But this conception of the government of the world, "all that the theist and the Christian have to fight for," the writer in Blackwood regards as a very derogatory view of the divine working. He says of scientific men: "It is impossible for them, or for any, to conceive too grandly of Nature, or of the unbroken harmony and continuity of its movements. The very magnificence of its order is only a further illustration of Divine wisdom; for surely the very thought of a Divine mind implies the perfection of wisdom, or, in other words, of order, as its expresssionexpression [sic]. The more, therefore, the order of Nature is explained, and its sequences seem to run into one another with unbroken continuity, only the more and not the less loftily will we be able to measure the working of the Divine mind."

Again, these writers come into sharp collision over the question of the atomic theory. There has been much complaint that Prof. Tyndall did not take up for discussion some special scientific topic which he had made his own; yet he did exactly this thing. His discourse is a monograph on that part of physical philosophy which he has been compelled during all his scientific life to study, that is, the evidence and import of the doctrine of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter. This is a problem which scientific men cannot evade: they are driven to it by the very exigencies of mental action; as Dr. McCosh well observes: "We seem to be obliged by a sort of necessity of thought or speech to fall back on some such conception. If every thing we see in the world be composite, and capable of analysis and division, we have to think and talk of something indivisible and undecomposable, which we may call particles, molecules, or atoms." But if the idea is thus fundamental and deals with the very essence and core of scientific philosophy, Prof. Tyndall certainly did not go out of his sphere in considering it. And though he is condemned, there appears to be no common ground for censure. His critics are as much at variance with each other as they are with him. The writer in the Penn Monthly attacks the atomic theory at the outset as if it were some sort of a religious enemy which must be got out of the way; and he scouts it as an unprovable hypothesis, bad metaphysics, and which explains nothing. On the other hand, the writer in Blackwood declares it to be "a perfectly valid theory, resting on its own