The Relations Between Religion and Science | Page 8

more and more observable, and then arises the notion of a law
or rule regulating the action of every such force. And a perpetually
increasing number of phenomena are brought under this head, and are
shown to be, not the immediate results of self-originating action, but
the more or less remote results of derivative action governed by laws.
And even a large number of those phenomena, which specially belong
to life and living creatures, in whom alone, if anywhere, the
self-originating action is to be found, are observed to be subject to law
and therefore to be the issue not of self-originating but of derivative
action. And this observed regularity it is found possible to trace much
more widely than it is possible to trace any clear evidence of what we
understand by force. And so, at last, we frequently use the word force
as it were by anticipation, not to express the cause of the phenomena,
which indeed we do not yet know, but as a convenient abbreviation for
a large number of facts classed under one head. And this it is which
enables Hume to maintain that we mean no more by a cause than an
event which is invariably followed by another event. We discover
invariability much faster than we can discover causation; and having
discovered invariability in any given case, we presume causation even
when we cannot yet show it, and use language in accordance with that
presumption. Thus, for instance, we speak of the force of gravitation,
although we cannot yet prove that there is any such force, and all that
we know is that material particles move as if such a force were acting
on them.
As Science advances it is seen that the regularity of phenomena is far
more important to us than their causes. And the attention of all students
of Nature is fixed on that rather than on causation. And this regularity
is seen to be more and more widely pervading all phenomena of every
class, until the mind is forced to conceive the possibility that it may be

absolutely universal, and that even will itself may come within its
supreme dominion.
But to the very last the idea of causation retains the traces of its origin.
For in the first place every step in this building up of science assumes a
permanence underlying all phenomena. We cannot believe that the
future will be like the past except because we believe that there is
something permanent which was in the past and will be in the future.
And this assumption of something permanent in things around us
comes from the consciousness of something permanent within us. We
know our own permanence. Whatever else we know or do not know
about ourselves, we are sure of our own personal identity through
successive periods of life. And as our explanation of things outside
begins by classing them with things inside we still continue to ascribe
permanence to whatever underlies phenomena even when we have long
ceased to ascribe individual wills to any except beings like ourselves.
And without this assumption of permanence our whole science would
come to the ground.
And in the second place let it be remembered that we began with the
will causing the motions of the limbs. Now there is, as far as we know,
no other power in us to affect external nature than by setting something
in motion. We can move our limbs, and by so doing move other things,
and by so doing avail ourselves of the laws of Nature to produce
remoter effects. But, except by originating motion, we cannot act at all.
And, accordingly, throughout all science the attempt is made to reduce
all phenomena to motions. Sounds, colours, heat, chemical action,
electricity, we are perpetually endeavouring to reduce to vibrations or
undulations, that is, to motion of some sort or other. The mind seems to
find a satisfaction when a change of whatever kind is shown to be, or
possibly to be, the result of movement. And so too all laws of Nature
are then felt to be satisfactorily explained when they can be traced to
some force exhibited in the movement of material particles. The law of
Gravitation has an enormous evidence in support of it considered
simply as a fact. And yet how many attempts have been made to
represent it as the result of vortices or of particles streaming in all
directions and pressing any two bodies together that lie in their path!

The facts which establish it are enough. Why then these attempts?
What is felt to be yet wanting? What is felt to be wanting is something
to show that it is the result of some sort of general or universal motion,
and that it thus falls under the same