The Unity of Law - As Exhibited in the Relations of Physical, Social, Mental and Moral Science

NOTE.

As this book was being printed original: "As this sheet is passing through the press", the author received the inaugural address of the new President of the British Association, Dr. Carpenter. He finds such strong similarities to the views expressed above that he has decided to include the closing paragraphs for his readers, as follows:

“Thus we are led to the highest point of humanity’s intellectual interpretation of Nature—the recognition of the unity of power, where all natural events are different expressions of that same power. All scientific inquiry now tends toward this point. The ability to convert physical forces into one another, the connection between these and life forces, and the close link original: "nexus" between mental and bodily activity—which, however we explain it, cannot be denied—all lead upward toward this same conclusion. The pyramid that has this philosophical conclusion at its peak has its foundation in the basic instincts of humanity.

“By our own ancestors original: "progenitors", as by the primitive peoples original: "untutored savage" of the present day, every change where human action was not obvious was attributed to a specific living spirit original: "animating intelligence". And so they attributed not only the movements of the planets, but all the phenomena of Nature, each to its own deity. These deities were granted more than human power, but they were also thought to possess human passions and to be subject to human unpredictability original: "capriciousness". As the consistent patterns original: "uniformities" of Nature became more clearly recognized, some of these deities were granted dominant control, while others were seen as their lower-ranking ministers. A calm majesty was attributed to the greater gods who sit above the clouds, while their inferiors might ‘come down to earth in human form.’ As the scientific study of Nature grew, the idea of its harmony and unity gained ever-increasing strength. And so, among the most enlightened Greek and Roman philosophers, we find a clear recognition of the idea of a single directing mind from which the order of Nature proceeds; for they obviously believed that, as our modern poet Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Man has expressed it—

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body Nature is, and God the Soul.

“Modern science, however, has taken a more specific direction. (By focusing its attention exclusively on the order of Nature, it has separated itself entirely from theology, whose role it is to seek after the cause of that order.) In this, science is fully justified, both by the complete independence of its objectives and by the historical fact that it has been continually ham—