way as to show us a vast connected whole, the natural universe. This matter however is dead; these laws are ultimate given truths. We did not make them, cannot see why just they and none other were from the beginning; we must accept them as they are. The whole world is a vast machine. A mind powerful enough might be possessed of the knowledge that La Place, and, in our own generation. Prof. Du Bois Reymond, have so finely described as the scientific ideal. Such a mind might have an universal formula, in its possession, a key to the mysteries of the succession of phenomena. Such a being could then, using this formula, calculate all events, as astronomers now predict eclipses. At every instant multitudes of air pulsations quiver about us. These, in all their forms, our mind possessed of this universal formula, would have been able to predict ages ago, just as certainly as you now can predict that the sun will rise to-morrow morning. All is predetermined: the glitter of every ice crystal on your frozen window-panes on a winter morning, the quiver of every muscle in the death agony of the fish that you pull out of a mountain-stream, the falling of every yellow leaf in the autumn woods, — each of these events could have been foreseen, mathematically calculated, and fully described, by one able to use the universal formula, and possessed, myriads of aeons ago, of an exact knowledge of the positions of the atoms of the original nebula from which our great stellar system condensed. Such is the natural world.
What religious aspect can this vast machine possess? What room is there for a higher element to
