en very few--who have been
inspired to face Nature boldly; and say--or, what is better, act as
if they were saying--"I find something in me which I do not find in
you; which gives me the hope that I can grow to understand you,
though you may not understand me; that I may become your master, and
not as now, you mine. And if not, I will know; or die in the
search."

It is to those men, the few and far between, in a very few ages and
very few countries, who have thus risen in rebellion against Nature,
and looked it in the face with an unquailing glance, that we owe
what we call Physical Science.

There have been four races--or rather a very few men of each four
races--who have faced Nature after this gallant wise.

First, the old Jews. I speak of them, be it remembered, exclusively
from an historical, and not a religious point of view.

These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highly
civilised, but sunk in the superstitions of nature-worship. They
invaded and mingled with tribes whose superstitions were even more
debased, silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they
escaped. Their own masses were for centuries given up to nature-
worship. Now, among those Jews arose men--a very few--sages--
prophets--call them what you will, the men were inspired heroes and
philosophers--who assumed towards nature an attitude utterly
different from the rest of their countrymen and the rest of the then
world; who denounced superstition and the dread of nature as the
parent of all manner of vice and misery; who for themselves said
boldly that they discerned in the universe an order, a unity, a
permanence of law, which gave them courage instead of fear. They
found delight and not dread in the thought that the universe obeyed
a law which could not be broken; that all things continued to that
day according to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature
totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful,
and yet reverent--identical with that which happily is beginning to
prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and
meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were
slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like
Theophrastus's superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on
the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that, for their part,
they would not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the
hills were carried into t