Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/151

Letter 13] ideas, through which God has revealed Himself to us as a God of Law and Order. I believe in the fixity of natural Law as much (I think) as the man of science does; I reverence a Law of Nature, not as a result of necessity, but as an expression of God's will. But your own remarks about the ordinary "suspension of the law of nature by the human will" appear to me to imply a little confusion of thought arising from a confused use of the word "nature" in two or more senses. On this point therefore I should like to say a few words.

1. Nature

i. Nature sometimes means the ordinary course of things apart from us and from our intervention; as when we say that "Nature looks gay"—an expression which we might use of fields and even of a not too artificial garden, but not of a city or a street.

In this sense it may be occasionally applied to the ordinary course of things in our own bodily frame, so far as it goes on without our deliberate intervention; as when a physician tells a fussy patient to cease from medicining himself and to "let Nature take its course."

ii. Nature sometimes means the ordinary course of things in ourselves, not in our bodies but in some other part of us, but still apart from our deliberate intervention; as when we say that "Nature impels us to avoid pain, to preserve our lives, to cherish our children, to love and revere our parents, and to seek the esteem and friendship of our neighbours."

But sometimes in human beings one "natural" impulse is opposed by another: as when the desire to preserve one's life is opposed by the desire to gain the esteem of one's neighbours. When these two conflict, which is to be called the more "natural"?