NATURAL TRUTH, DIVINE EFFECTS OF SCIENCE. 283

All science, therefore, is divine, and divine, not in the sense of pantheism, but in the sense of its being the correlative object created in harmony with the human reason. Science is the object of reason, and reality is the object of science; and both reason and reality are the productions of the divine Creator.

Error and superstition are human; they belong to fallen humanity; they are not divine; they form no part of the original constitution of the earth; they are darkness, not light. But true knowledge is God's intention; for that purpose the intellect of man was made. Reason, on the one hand, and reality on the other, are the correlatives of creation, and science is the middle term that unites them; reality giving the matter of science, and reason giving the form. Knowledge, therefore, is the divine intention; and all the sciences may be viewed, not as human acquisitions, but as fulfilments of the divine purpose in creating an intellect to comprehend, and an object to be comprehended. Religion in the individual may exist without a particle of science; but can it be maintained, for a moment, that the race of man can reach its highest condition, and achieve its highest destiny, without becoming acquainted with those natural truths in which practical consequences of the most important kind are necessarily implicated?

Let us, then, conclude that all scientific truth is divine, (or, if that term appear too strong, let us say that all scientific truth is the natural intention of the Creator of our system,) that it is the intellect of the creature apprehending correctly the divine arrangements of the created. Natural science is the apprehension

of the divine wisdom and power, as St. Paul himself teaches us," For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse : because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened." Epistle to Romans, 1st chapter.

Immediately, then, that we admit science to be not merely human, science acquires a new character. It becomes the exponent of humanity, and points out the order of human progression. We have here a sure basis of operation, a foundation on which the reason may at last rest in constructing its philosophy of man. Science is stable. It shifts not with opinion, and changes not with lapse of ages. Were all knowledge obliterated, and man to begin to-morrow a new course of research, he could come only to the same truths and to the same sciences; and those sciences would evolve in a similar order, were the experiment to take place a hundred or a thousand times.

SECTION II. THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE ON MAN'S

TERRESTRIAL CONDITION.

ADMITTING, then, the divinity of science, in so far as science has been really ascertained, we revert to its connection with man's practical function, and inquire

how the dogma of knowledge is efficient to produce an amended condition of man upon the globe.

Every science has a millennium; that is, a period when its truths are discovered, acknowledged, and carried into practical operation.

First come the mathematical sciences. These, as mere exercises of the intellect, are by no means of a high character. They are little more, in fact, than mechanical reasonings, mere methods of computation performed by the aid of signs. The discovery of the methods has, no doubt, called forth some of the highest exercises of human genius; but genius looks beyond the mere computation of numbers, quantities, and spaces.

When we turn, however, to the application of the mathematical sciences, their influence in enlightening mankind is of the very highest order. Identity, equality, number, quantity, space, and force, mere abstractions of the reason, become fundamental elements of knowledge, by which the observed realities of nature are made to function in man's intelligent apprehension. Sensational observation furnishes only the very smallest part even of physical science. Strictly speaking, observation furnishes only a momentary image or impression, or a succession of momentary images or impressions. No man ever observed motion. He observes successively in time material substantives in successive positions in space; but the motion he never did observe, and never can observe. Let materialists or sensationalists reason as they may, they cannot tell what physical properties motion has. It has no color, no taste, no smell, no sound; it cannot be felt or

appreciated by the senses, and to the sensationalist it has no existence. It is a word he has no right to use; but use it he must, and in so doing he borrows it from the intellectualist.*. And so with force. Force is inappreciable by sense. Sense never saw force, never felt it, and never can assign one single Sensational property to it. It is posited by the reason; and the moment we become sensationalists, we should drop the word and the concept as chimeras of human invention. And, in so doing, we must drop the science of dynamics. No greater absurdity was ever imposed on man, nothing was ever more frantically credulous, nothing that the wildest superstition ever raved in its most intense moments of insane imagination, was more utterly contrary to man's universal experience, and man's universal reason, than the attribution of all man's knowledge to sense. Nor can we approve of those arguments which drag the question into the region of theology. That is not its region. The battle cannot be fought there till won in another field. It must be fought as a question of philosophy in the region of dynamics; for if once we substantiate power, and can show a science of force, and perform with that science of force rational operations whose conclusions are verified in nature, and predict by its aid

* It is one of the changes which the reason includes in the general law, (necessary form of thought,) "Every change must have a cause." This is the condition under which man thinks. He may deny the proposition, or mystify it, from his inability to appreciate mental phenomena; but it is as much a condition of his thought while engaged in the denial, as it is while engaged in its admission. In mechanics, the change is motion, the cause is force.

far-off truths only to occur in reality years after the rational calculation has been made, we have grounded the validity of the reason, and proven beyond dispute its undoubted right to substantiate things hidden from sense, and forever beyond the reach of sensational apprehension.*

But if sense furnish so little in a science, mind must furnish all that is not mere momentary impression ; and the rational operations of mind, applied to the material realities of nature, are expressed in the mathematical sciences when they are brought to bear on physical nature, and to lend the aid of their computing power to systematize the impressions of the senses. Number, quantity, space, and force, (essentially nonphysical concepts,) are absolutely necessary for the formation of physical science; and all the observations that man could make would be forever dog's views of nature, were it not for the introduction of those rational elements which tear the veil from the world of matter, and lay bare the mysteries of its divine arrangement.

When man has evolved the mathematical sciences and dynamics, he has acquired a vast power over the world of matter; not merely a power of intellectual apprehension, but, over and above, a power of action

a power to perform things which react intensely on his own social condition, and place him on an entirely different footing as regards his relations to the

* "The most certain method that can guide us in the research of truth consists in rising, by induction, from phenomena to laws, and from laws to forces." - LAPLACE, Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités,