"Aber im stillen Gemach entwirft bedeutende Zirkel Sinnend der Weise. Folgt durch die Lüfte dem Klang, folgt durch den Aether dem Strani, SCHILLER. II. PRAYER AND NATURAL LAW. THE aspects of Nature are more varied and impressive in Alpine regions than elsewhere. The mountains in their setting of deep-blue sky; the glow of firmament and peaks at sunrise and sunset; the formation and distribution of clouds; the descent of rain, hail, and snow; the stealthy slide of glaciers and the rush of avalanches and rivers; the fury of storms; thunder and lightning, with their occasional accompaniment of blazing woods-all these things tend to excite the feelings and to bewilder the mind. In this entanglement of phenomena it seems hopeless to seek for law or orderly connection. And before the thought of law dawned upon the human mind men naturally referred these inexplicable effects to personal agency. The savage saw in the fall of a cataract the leap of a spirit, and the echoed thunder-peal was to him the hammer-clang of an exasperated god. Propitiation of these terrible powers was the consequence, and sacrifice was offered to the demons of earth and air. But observation tends to chasten the emotions and to check those structural efforts of the intellect which have emotion for their base. One by one natural phenomena have been associated with their proximate causes; and the idea of direct personal volition mixing itself in the economy of Nature is retreating more and more. Many of us fear this tendency; our faith and feelings are dear to us, and we look with suspicion and dislike on any philosophy, the apparent tendency of which is to dry up the soul. Probably every change from ancient savagery to our present enlightenment excited, in a greater or less degree, a fear of this kind. But the fact is, that we have not yet determined whether the form under which they now appear in the world is necessary to the life and warmth of religious feeling. We may err in linking the imperishable with the transitory, and confound the living plant with the decaying pole to which it clings. My object, however, at present is not to argue, but to mark a tendency. We have ceased to propitiate the powers of Nature-ceased even to pray for things in manifest contradiction to natural laws. In Protestant countries, at least, I think it is conceded that the age of miracles is past. The general question of miracles is at present in able and accomplished hands; and were it not so, my polemical acquirements are so limited, that I should not presume to enter upon a discussion of this subject on its entire merits. But there is one little outlying point, which attaches itself to this question, on which a student of science, without quitting the ground which strictly belongs to him, may offer a remark. At the auberge near the foot of the Rhone glacier, I met, in the summer of 1858, an athletic young priest, who, after a solid breakfast, including a bottle of wine, informed me that he had come up to "bless the mountains." This was the annual custom of the place. Year by year the Highest was entreated, by official intercessors, to make such meteorological arrangements as should insure food and shelter for the flocks and herds of the Valaisians. A diversion of the Rhone, or a deepening of the river's bed, would have been of incalculable benefit to the inhabitants of the valley at the time I now mention, But the priest would have shrunk from the idea of asking the Omnipo tent to open a new channel for the river, or to cause a portion of it to flow over the Grimsel Pass, and down the vale of Oberhasli to Brientz. This he would have deemed a miracle, and he did not come to ask the Creator to perform miracles, but to do something which he manifestly thought lay quite within the bounds of the natural and non-miraculous. A Protestant gentleman, who was present at the time, smiled at this recital. He had no faith in the priest's blessing, still he deemed his prayer different in kind from a request to open a new river-cut, or to cause the water to flow up-hill. In a similar manner we Protestants smile at the honest Tyrolese priest, who, when he feared the bursting of a glacier-dam, offered the sacrifice of the mass upon the ice as a means of averting the calamity. That poor man did not expect to convert the ice into adamant, or to strengthen its texture so as to enable it to withstand the pressure of the water; nor did he expect that his sacrifice would cause the stream to roll back upon its source and relieve him, by a miracle, of its presence. But beyond the boundaries of his knowledge lay a region where rain was generated, he knew not how. He was not so presumptuous as to expect a miracle, but he firmly believed that in yonder cloud-land matters could be so arranged, without trespass on the miraculous, that the stream which threatened him and his flock should be caused to shrink within its proper bounds. Both these priests fashioned that which they did not understand to their respective wants and wishes. In their case imagination wrought, unconditioned by a knowledge of laws. A similar state of mind was long prevalent among mechanicians; many of whom, and some of them extremely skilful ones, were occupied a century ago with the question of a perpetual motion. They aimed at constructing a machine which should execute work without the expenditure of power; and many of them went mad in the pursuit of this object. The faith in such a consummation, involving as it did immense personal interest to the inventor, was extremely exciting, and every attempt to destroy this faith was met by bitter resentment on the part of those who held it. Gradually, however, as men became more and more acquainted with the true functions of machinery, the dream dissolved. The hope of getting work out of mere mechanical combinations disappeared; but still there remained for the speculator a cloud-land denser than that which filled the imagination of the Tyrolese priest, and out of which he still hoped to evolve perpetual motion. There was the mystic store of chemic force, which nobody understood; there were heat and light, electricity and magnetism, all competent to produce mechanical motions.' Here, then, is the mine in which we must seek our gem. A modified and more refined form of the ancient faith revived; and, for aught I know, a remnant of sanguine designers may at the present moment be engaged on the problem which like-minded men in former years left unsolved. And why should a perpetual motion, even under modern conditions, be impossible? The answer to this question is the statement of that great generalization of modern science, which is known under the name of the Conservation of Energy. This principle asserts that no power can make its appearance in Nature without an equivalent expenditure of some other power; that natural agents are so related to each other as to be mutually convertible, but that no new agency is created. Light runs into heat; heat into electricity; electricity into magnetism; magnetism into mechanical force; and mechanical force again into light and heat. The Proteus changes, but he is ever the same; and his changes in Nature, supposing no miracle to supervene, are the expression, not of spontaneity, but of physical neces 1 See Helmholtz-" Wechselwirkung der Naturkräfte." |