Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/341

1858.] are thankful that so profound a student of Nature as Mr. Agassiz has tracked the warm foot-prints of Divinity throughout all the vestiges of creation.

There is danger, however, that, in accepting this doctrine as a truth, we may be led into an inexact conception of the so-called physical laws, unless we closely examine the sense in which we use the expression. The forces which act according to these laws, and the various forms of the so-called matter, or concrete forces, are often spoken of as if they were blind agencies and existences, acting by an inherent fate-like power of their own. But if everything outside of our consciousness resolves itself, in the last analysis, into force, or something capable of producing change, and if force existing by the will of an omniscient and omnipresent Being, to whom time has no absolute significance, is simply God himself in action, then we shall find it impossible to limit the causal agency of the physical forces. All we can say is, that commonly they appear to move in certain rectilinear paths, in which they manifest a degree of uniformity and precision so amazing that we are lost in the infinite intelligence they display,—unless we become perfectly stupid to it, and think, as in the old fable, there is no music in it because we are made deaf by its continued harmony. No single leaf ever made a mistake in falling, though in so doing it solved more problems than were ever held in all the libraries that have changed or are changing into dust or ashes.

We are willing to accept the belief of Mr. Agassiz, "that matter does not exist as such, but is everywhere and always a specific thing, as are all finite beings." But we must extend the same idea to the physical forces, and believe them to be specific agencies, and their acts specific acts,—in other words, each one of them a Divine manifestation. Theology is close upon us in these speculations. "Perhaps," says Mr. Robertson, in the volume of admirable sermons just republished, "even the Eternal himself is more closely bound to his works than our philosophical systems have conceived. Perhaps matter is only a mode of thought." Looking, then, at our recognized forms of matter and physical force as expressions of a self-limiting omnipotence, we concede that the uniform lines of action in which human observation has hitherto traced them do not, and, so far as we can see, cannot, shape the curves of the simplest organism.

It is time for us to close these volumes, to which we cannot even hope to have done justice, and leave them to those graver tribunals that will in due season award their well-weighed decisions. We have taken the Master's hand, and followed Nature through all her paths of life. We have trod with him the shores of old oceans that roll no more, and traced the Providence that orders the creation of to-day engraved in every stony feature of their obsolete organisms. We have broken into that mysterious chamber, the chosen studio of the Infinite Artist, where, beneath its marble or crystalline dome, he fashions the embryo from its formless fluids. And as we turn reluctantly away, the accents we have once already heard linger with us: "In one word, all these facts in their natural connection proclaim aloud the One God, whom man may know, adore, and love; and Natural History must, in good time, become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe, as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdoms."