agency.
Indeed, marks of such an agency seemed to meet men everywhere. But now
all this has changed. Step by step science has been unravelling the
tangle, and has loosened with its human fingers the knots that once
seemed _deo digni vindice_. It has enabled us to see in nature a
complete machine, needing no aid from without. It has made a conception
of things rational and coherent that was formerly absurd and arbitrary.
Science has done all this; but this is all that it has done. The
dogmatism of denial it has left as it found it, an unverified and
unverifiable assertion. It has simply made this dogmatism consistent
with itself. But in doing this, as men will soon come to see, it has
done a great deal more than its chief masters bargained for. Nature, as
explained by science, is nothing more than a vast automaton; and man
with all his ways and works is simply a part of Nature, and can, by no
device of thought, be detached from or set above it. He is as absolutely
automatic as a tree is, or as a flower is; and is an incapable as a tree
or flower of any spiritual responsibility or significance. Here we see
the real limits of science. It will explain the facts of life to us, it
is true, but it will not explain the value that hitherto we have
attached to them. Is that solemn value a fact or fancy? As far as proof
and reason go, we can answer either way. We have two simple and opposite
statements set against each other, between which argument will give us
no help in choosing, and between which the only arbiter is a judgment
formed upon utterly alien grounds. As for proof, the nature of the case
does not admit of it. The world of moral facts, if it existed a thousand
times, could give no more proof of its existence than it does now. If on
other grounds we believe that it does exist, then signs, if not proofs
of it, at once surround us everywhere. But let the belief in its reality
fail us, and instantly the whole cloud of witnesses vanishes. For
science to demand a proof that shall convince it on its own premisses is
to demand an impossibility, and to involve a contradiction in terms.
Science is only possible on the assumption that nature is uniform.
Morality is only possible on the assumption that this uniformity is
interfered with by the will. The world of morals is as distinct from the
world of science as a wine is from the cup that holds it; and to say
that it does not exist because science can find no trace of it, is to
s