with certainty their respective future. positions in relation to the sun, and thereby ascertain whether, at any stated future time, the attractive influence of the sun will be in augmentation of the moon's attraction, or whether it will be in direct opposition to it; and can, therefore, with like certainty, predict when and where will happen those very high or spring tides, or those very low or neap tides, of which many of you may have been witnesses, and all must have heard.1 And thus a class of phenomena, which little more than a century ago were regarded, like the weather, as inexplicable, have been traced to the operation of invariable laws, and the great theory of the tides is now shown to have this scientific sanction, viz., the fulfilment of its previsions so exact as to guide our conduct. You can now understand how science is enabled to give such information to the mariner as will enable him to fix beforehand the hour at which his vessel, on arriving in its destined port, shall find sufficient water to allow him to place it safely in connection with the shore; and you can appreciate how much to science are owing the speed, safety, and precision that characterise the 'Tidal Services' between this country and the continent.

The human mind, contemplating the two theories, or systems, which I have been contrasting, concerning God's secular providence, and the relation in which man must stand towards them, seems so constituted as to find itself irresistibly impelled to ask the question,

1This alternate mutual reinforcement and destruction of the solar and lunar attraction causing what are known as the spring and neap tides, the former being their sum and the latter their difference.' -Herschel's Astronomy (752).

How, and upon what principle, does the Almighty govern this world? Is it directly, by the operation of his arbitrary, supernatural, inscrutable will; or is it indirectly, by the operation of his invariable, natural, discoverable law; or can it be partly by the one, and partly by the other?

If, and to the extent to which we are governed by invariable laws, it must be most important that we should know them; and equally important is it that we should be instructed how to regulate our lives in accordance with their dictates.

Now, Science claims to be a revelation;1 and none the less sacred that it has been a continuous disclosure, through the medium of man's natural intelligence, of the established order of the universe, and the method of the Divine government on Earth; and it is the faith of science that this world, so far as it can be comprehended by the human reason, is governed by God's natural laws.2 A faith, not exactly childlike, nor yet lacking reverence, and simple as that of

'The poor Indian, whose untutored mind

Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.' 3

1 Herbert Spencer's First Principles, chap. i., 'Religion and Science,' sec. 6.

'Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of Light and Fountain of all Knowledge communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties.'-Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, book iv. chap. xix, sec. 4.

2 That God governs the world by general fixed laws, and that he has endowed us with capacities of reflecting upon this constitu tion of things.'-Butler's Analogy of Religion, &c, part i, chap. iii., 'Of the Moral Government of God.'

3 Pope's Essay on Man, Ep. i. 99.

Science proclaims it to be her mission to teach a knowledge of these laws; and she offers for our examination overwhelming evidence in support of her faith.

Now, it is the aim and object of the Inductive Philosophy, planting her stand firmly on Science, to supply an intellectual method whereby we may learn how to harmonise the conduct of life with the sanctions of the natural laws.

The student of theology whose anxiety to arrive at truth may have led him to pursue his search after the origin of some dogma until he has succeeded in detecting it amidst the subtleties of the scholastic metaphysics of the middle ages, is aware that about the thirteenth century traces are to be met with of the germs of the inductive philosophy. In the intellectual contest that was then being carried on between the Nominalists and Realists, as they were barbarously termed, but which was a real struggle between reason and authority, he finds that, whilst on one side men were taught to distrust the evidence of the senses and conclusions from experience, they were, on the other side, led to think more for themselves, and examine their own convictions-to look to the external evidence by which assertions might be supported. It is, however, to our immortal countryman, Lord Bacon, that we must turn for the first complete exposition of that system of thought to which he gave the name Inductive Philosophy. It is, indeed, a prevailing popular opinion that Lord Bacon was its inventor or discoverer, and every student of his writings well knows with what

admirable precision and force he has explained and illustrated the inductive method of research; and the powerful impression which so masterly an analysis has made upon subsequent thinkers has undoubtedly contributed to sustain such prevailing opinion. It has also been popularly believed that Bacon was the first man who rose up against the philosophy of Aristotle when at the height of its power. Yet, strictly speaking, if there be any one who could rightly be regarded as the father of the inductive philosophy, it is Aristotle himself; for he it was who first conceived and announced its primary principle, proclaiming with a clearness never yet excelled, that facts derived from observation and experience were the only grounds of real knowledge; and that our ideas, even the most abstract, have their origin in our sensations; 1 and a probable cause why the analytical and encyclopædic intellect of Aristotle never proceeded practically on the inductive method was owing to the physical sciences not being in existence, fitting instruments of research uninvented, and laws of nature nearly unknown. There was no sufficient field of experience to resort to, for the purpose either of generalising facts, or of verifying inductions by an appeal to experiment, the only means whereby hypothesis and theory can be efficiently tested. It is true, indeed, that the dialectical subtleties of the Schoolmen, which in Bacon's day tyrannised over the human mind, having been for the most part

1 See the passages from Aristotle's Works, supporting the statement in the text, collected in G. H. Lewes's 'Aristotle,' a chapter from the Hist. of Science, pp. 45-100; and Hist. of Philosophy, 'Aristotle's Method,' vol. i. pp. 284-296.

elaborated from or fortified by corrupt translations and vitiated versions of Aristotle's works, had come to be generally designated as the Aristotelian philosophy; a misnomer, however, inducing a profound and accurate scholar, the humane and accomplished Grotius, to declare that truth, in the service of which Aristotle had faithfully spent his life, suffered no oppression so great as that which was inflicted in Aristotle's name.'1 Yet Bacon's great merit rather lay in concentrating the few and scattered lights of his predecessors, reducing to rule what others had effected fortuitously and fixing the world's attention on the distinguishing characteristics of true and false philosophy, by a felicity of illustration peculiar to himself, irradiated by the luminous power of his bold and figurative eloquence.

At the time when Bacon wrote, science, properly so called, was only in its dawn. Astronomy, now the queen of the inductive sciences, was gradually emerging from astrology; Gilbert was still experimenting on the singular properties of the magnet; Harvey was on the point of discovering the circulation of the blood; and Descartes was about to illumine the mathematical world by his brilliant discovery of the possibility of applying algebra to the geometry of curves, and his

1 Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, &c., proleg. sec. 43. 'Ita ut veritas, cui Aristoteles fidelem navavit operam, nulla jam rẻ magis opprimatur quam Aristotelis nomine.'

2 Descartes was the first who expressed curves by algebraic equations. Montucla, Hist. des Mathémat., vol. i. pp. 704, 705. ‘A discovery which constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.'

J. S. Mill's Exam. of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, pp. 531, 533; wherein is contained a very lucid explanation of the nature and practical application of this happy discovery of Descartes.