c reason."

I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down by
science, disorder is unimaginable. If a being endowed with perfect
intellectual and aesthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for
suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost
powers to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him
to be a sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of
time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry
would present itself; and each of them would show itself to be the
logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the conditions
which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be
filled with that _Amor intellectualis Dei_, the beatific vision of the
_vita contemplativa_, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages,
Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable
eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if
sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the
bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor
mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord of all, and
disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us pain.

The other fallacious employment of the names of scientific conceptions
which pervades the preacher's utterance, brings me back to the proper
topic of the present essay. It is the use of the word "law" as if it
denoted a thing--as if a "law of nature," as science understands it,
were a being endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which the
phenomena expressed by that law are brought about. The preacher asks,
"Might not there be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of
a higher?" He tells us that every time we lift our arms we defy the
law of gravitation. He asks whether some day certain "royal and
ultimate laws" may not come and "wreck" those laws which are at
present, it would appear, acting as nature's police. It is evident,
from these expressions, that "laws," in the mind of the preacher, are
entities having an objective existence in a graduated hierarchy. And
it would appear that the "royal laws" are by no means to be regarded
as constitutional royalties: at any moment, they may, like Eastern
despots, descend in wrath among the middle-class and plebeian laws,
which have hitherto done the drudgery of the world's work, and, to use
phraseology not unknown in our seats of learning--"ma