Century, such
declaration were inept enough; which nevertheless to our fathers, of
the First Century, was full of meaning.

'"But is it not the deepest Law of Nature that she be constant?" cries
an illuminated class: "Is not the Machine of the Universe fixed to
move by unalterable rules?" Probable enough, good friends: nay I, too,
must believe that the God, whom ancient inspired men assert to be
"without variableness or shadow of turning," does indeed never change;
that Nature, that the Universe, which no one whom it so pleases can be
prevented from calling a Machine, does move by the most unalterable
rules. And now of you, too, I make the old inquiry: What those same
unalterable rules, forming the complete Statute-Book of Nature, may
possibly be?

'They stand written in our Works of Science, say you; in the
accumulated records of Man's Experience?--Was Man with his Experience
present at the Creation, then, to see how it all went on? Have any
deepest scientific individuals yet dived-down to the foundations of the
Universe, and gauged everything there? Did the Maker take them into His
counsel; that they read His groundplan of the incomprehensible All; and
can say, This stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not
in anywise! These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we
also are; have seen some handbreadths deeper than we see into the Deep
that is infinite, without bottom as without shore.

'Laplace's Book on the Stars, wherein he exhibits that certain
Planets, with their Satellites, gyrate round our worthy Sun, at a rate
and in a course, which, by greatest good fortune, he and the like of
him have succeeded in detecting,--is to me as precious as to another.
But is this what thou namest "Mechanism of the Heavens," and "System
of the World"; this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all
Herschel's Fifteen-thousand Suns per minute, being left out, some
paltry handful of Moons, and inert Balls, had been--looked at,
nicknamed, and marked in the Zodiacal Way-bill; so that we can now
prate of their Whereabout; their How, their Why, their What, being hid
from us, as in the signless Inane?

'System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature
remains of quite _infinite_ depth, of quite infinite expansion; and
all Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries
and measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this our
little fraction of a Planet, is partia