Tue Introductory volume to the valuable series of Science Primers, published by Macmillan & Ca., under the editorship of Professors Huxley, Roscoe, and Balfour Stewart, has just been issued. It is written by Professor Huxley, and his name is a sufficient guarantee for ita clearness and genera! value. We do not purpose to review it, as it contains nothing that is not the common property of educated people, but is intended to indicate the way in which foundation should be laid for the linstraction of children in scientific matters, We take it therefore merely jas an authoritative exposition of the groundwork which, in the opinion of the most advanced men of science, should underlie the teaching which the ising generation should receive. The what is the initial conception that a child must be encouraged to form in order to make sure that his study of natural phenomena shall be fruitful? And to this it replies in the most unmistakeable way, that the first thing to learn is the fact that there are laws of ature. "No one is sv foolish as tu believe that anything happens by chance, or that there are any raul accidents, in the sense of events which have no cause." So says the Professor, but we four that there re very many indeed who still believe that the exercise of aman will is free, that is, that it is not absolutely determined by causes which have been accumulating ever since man first appeared on the globe. Only a couple of months ago we read an article by a eminent English bishop in which he flattered self, proved the freedom of the will by adducing the incontro. vertible fact that no matter what ad: able course of action was presented to him in any given conjuncture, he felt that be had the power of deliberately choosing the opposite course. It did not strike him that he would be moved to this assertion of his freedom merely for the purpose of display, and that he was, in giving the example, confound.
g the freedom of willing with the freedom of doing what we will or of leaving it undone. We admit that the instance is n most deceptive one, but it ought not to have tripped up a bishop. The choice between two actions, no matter how trivial, is not arbitrary, for the exercise of the will depends on some motive, and that motive is the expression of a long series of hereditary conditions. We are conscious of the emotion which prompts the will, but we are not conscious of what that emotion depends upon and expresses. In fact social life would be an impossibility unless we could calenlate correctly upon what people will think, feel, and do under given cireumstances, that is, unless we coold count on a uniformity in the succession of mental operations. Expressed otherwise, experience has taught us that there are certain rules in consonance with which men's wills act. roles are laws of nature. We put a lunatic in confinement for no other ultimate reason than that his will acts in a casual and incoherent manner, for that a disorderly will expresses itself in inconsequent actions is merely an accidental concomitant. of freedom from personal restraint, A man whose will is perfectly free is therefore a madman, the converse of the proposition not true; and thus even the philoso. phers who uphold the freedom of the will act, in their daily relations with their fellows, on the belief that the will is not by any means free.
So much for what we consider the too favourable view which the Professor takes of the way people talk and think about the sequences of natural phenomena in one most important department, What we have brought forward enforces his general doctrine of the paramount necessity for a scientific way of thinking before the problems of knowledge are attacked, 'A most essential point which he brings into prominence is thet "the laws of nature are not the causes of the order of nature, but only our way of stating as much as we have made out of that order." It is not in obedience to laws of nature that there is uniformity, The law is the expression of the fact of uniformity. he existence of the law of gravitation is nob the ensue of a stone falling to the ground. That law expresses in ® convenient form the totally inexplicable fact that all bodies attract one another mutually in certain ratio. And therefore laws of vaturo are not fixed and immutable in the sense of being the enactments of fa supreme and omnipotent legislator, They are of human construction, "con mon knowledge having grown into scientific knowledge, as it has become more and more exact and complete." If we are asked whether there may not be divergences from the operation of exact laws brought about by a supramandane intelligence, we can only reply that we do not know. But of this we are sure, that all the operation of our practical reason, all the possibilities of right judgment in all and singular of our relations to the external world and to our fellow-mon, are based on our individual and ancestral experience of a uniform order, and not upon any conjectures of a fanciful and cupricions disorder. In the dopartments of conduct or morals, in history or politics, in pablic health or hygiene, og well as in the succession of purely physical phenomena, or science in the common acceptation of the term, activity directed to the attainment of a specified object whether intellectual, moral, or practical, can be fruitful only on the condition that Nature shall be conceived as uniform in her operations. Hence the absolute need for a searching and impartial investigation of every tale of miracle. Supposing that a miracle were absolutely proved to have occurred, we may safely assert that These it would not have been an interference
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.