interest for the cultivators of physical science, the great Newton.

Thus, in the observations on the nature of the Deity with which he closes the “ Opticks," he declares the various portions of the world, organic and inorganic, "can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living Agent, who being in all places, is more able by his will to move the bodies within his boundless uniform sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the parts of the universe, than we are by our will to move the parts of our own bodies." And in the Scholium at the end of the "Principia," he says, "God is one and the same God always and everywhere. He is omnipresent, not by means of his virtue alone, but also by his substance, for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him all things are contained, and move, but without mutual passion : God is not acted upon by the motions of bodies; and they suffer no resistance from the omnipresence of God." And he refers to several passages confirmatory of this view, not only in the Scriptures, but also in writers who hand down to us the opinions of some of the most philosophical thinkers of the pagan world. He does not disdain to quote the poets, and among the rest, the verses of Virgil;

Principio cœlum ac terras camposque liquentes
Lucentemque globum lunæ, Titaniaque astra,
Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus

Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet:

warning his reader, however, against the doctrine which such expressions as these are sometimes understood to

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express: "All these things he rules, not as the soul of the world, but as the Lord of all."

Clarke, the friend and disciple of Newton, is one of those who has most strenuously put forwards the opinion of which we are speaking, "All things which we commonly say are the effects of the natural powers of matter and laws of motion-are, indeed (if we will speak strictly and properly), the effects of God's acting upon matter continually and at every moment, either immediately by himself, or mediately by some created intelligent being. Consequently there is no such thing as the cause of nature, or the power of nature," independent of the effects produced by the will of God.

Dugald Stewart has adopted and illustrated the same opinion, and quotes with admiration the well-known passage of Pope, concerning the Divine Agency, which

"Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent."

Mr. Stewart, with no less reasonableness than charity, asserts the propriety of interpreting such passages according to the scope and spirit of the reasonings with which they are connected;* since, though by a captious reader they might be associated with erroneous views of the Deity, they may be susceptible of a more favourable construction; and we may often see in them only the results of the necessary imperfection of our language, when we dwell upon the omnipresence and universal activity of God.

* Phil. of Act. and Moral Powers, i. 373.

Finally, we may add that the same opinions still obtain the assent of the best philosophers and divines of our time. Sir John Herschel says (Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, p. 37), "We would no way be understood to deny the constant exercise of His direct power in maintaining the system of nature; or the ultimate emanation, of every energy which material agents exert, from His immediate will, acting in conformity with His own laws." And the Bishop of London, in a note to his "Sermon on the Duty of combining Religious Instruction with Intellectual Culture," observes, "The student in natural philosophy will find rest from all those perplexities which are occasioned by the obscurity of causation, in the supposition which, although it was discredited by the patronage of Malebranche and the Cartesians, has been adopted by Clarke and Dugald Stewart, and which is by far the most simple and sublime account of the matter; that all the events which are continually taking place in the different parts of the material universe, are the immediate effects of the divine agency."

CHAP. IX. On the Impression produced by considering the Nature and Prospects of Science; or, on the Impossibility of the Progress of our Knowledge ever enabling us to comprehend the Nature of the Deity.

If we were to stop at the view presented in the last chapter, it might be supposed that by considering God as eternal and omnipresent, conscious of all the relations, and of all the objects of the universe, instituting laws founded on the contemplation of these

relations, and carrying these laws into effect by his immediate energy, we had attained to a conception, in some degree definite, of the Deity, such as natural philosophy leads us to conceive him. But by resting in this mode of conception, we should overlook, or at least should disconnect from our philosophical doctrines, all that most interests and affects us in the character of the Creator and Preserver of the world; namely, that he is the lawgiver and judge of our actions; the proper object of our prayer and adoration; the source from which we may hope for moral strength here, and for the reward of our obedience and the elevation of our nature in another state of existence.

We are very far from believing that our philosophy alone can give us such assurance of these important truths as is requisite for our guidance and support; but we think that even our physical philosophy will point out to us the necessity of proceeding far beyond that conception of God, which represents him merely as the mind in which reside all the contrivance, law, and energy of the material world. We believe that the view of the universe which modern science has already opened to us, compared with the prospect of what she has still to do in pursuing the path on which she V has just entered, will show us how immeasurably inadequate such a mode of conception would be: and that if we take into our account, as we must in reason do, all that of which we have knowledge and consciousness, and of which we have as yet no systematic science, we shall be led to a conviction that the Creator and Preserver of the material world must also

contain in him such properties and attributes as imply his moral character, and as fall in most consistently with all that we learn in any other way of his providence and holiness, his justice and mercy.

I. The sciences which have at present acquired any considerable degree of completeness, are those in which an extensive and varied collection of phenomena, and their proximate causes, have been reduced to a few simple general laws. Such are Astronomy and Mechanics, and perhaps, so far as its physical conditions are concerned, Optics. Other portions of human knowledge can be considered as perfect sciences, in any strict sense of the term, only when they have assumed this form; when the various appearances which they involve are reduced to a few principles, such as the laws of motion and the mechanical properties of the luminiferous ether. If we could trace the endless varieties of the forms of crystals, and the complicated results of chemical composition, to some one comprehensive law necessarily pointing out the crystalline form of any given chemical compound, Mineralogy would become an exact science. As yet, however, we can scarcely boast of the existence of any other such sciences than those which we at first mentioned: and so far therefore as we attempt to give definiteness to our conception of the Deity, by considering him as the intelligent depositary and executor of laws of nature, we can subordinate to such a mode of conception no portion of the creation, save the mechanical movements of the universe, and the propagation and properties of light.