Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/377

 THE MODERN MIND 359

pretation of natural phenomena. The minister of religion proclaimed with assured conviction the divine purposes in storms and pestilences, in smiling fields of plenty, in sun shine and rain, in sickness and health, in eclipses and con junctions of the heavenly bodies, in all the natural occur rences which touched, or seemed to touch, the interests of human beings ; and the people received these interpretations with almost unquestioning assent. But now the preacher is usually hesitant or dumb on this theme; and when he con tinues the role of interpreter of the religious significance of natural phenomena, his utterances are treated by minds formed in the scientific mould as impious presumption or idle guessing.

But the difficulty becomes more serious still when natural law comes to be considered as universal, covering the realm of mind as well as that of the physical world. If, as its sway is perceived to extend in all directions, natural law precludes the interpretation of the phenomena it covers in terms of the free determination of personal will, what must be the inevitable conclusion of the whole matter? That is a philosophical problem of the first magnitude; and it is not within the purview of this book to offer a solution of it, though I can not refrain from offering one or two sugges tions as to the direction in which the solution must be sought. First, the concepts of &quot; natural law,&quot; &quot; cause &quot; and &quot; effect &quot; must be subjected to a radical criticism, which will certainly show that as usually held they are exceedingly crude and superficial ideas objectivizing and hypostatizing pure men tal constructions. A natural law, reduced to simple terms, is only the uniformity or invariability of a series of phenomena. But that uniformity or invariability of se quences we erect into an objective entity, and regard it, thus objectivized, as the explanation of the invariable sequences of which it is, in fact, only the human formulation. We have thus expelled from the natural universe the multitude of phantom spirits with which the primitive man populated it as his explanation of natural phenomena and replaced

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