"Where is that soul they talk of? I
have never seen it." These are phenomena of the same order. This
infirmity of the mind, which leads certain savants to think that the
ordinary subject of their studies is everything, must not be imputed to
science. A man accustomed to the exclusive observation of material
phenomena, may become a materialist by the effect of his mental habits,
and this really happens, in fact, in too many instances; but the study
in itself is not responsible for this result. Let us endeavor to prove
this, by clearly defining the object of the natural sciences.

When the matter of a phenomenon is given to us, the understanding
proposes to itself three questions:

1. How does the fact manifest itself? what is the mode of its existence?
The answer gives us the law of the phenomenon. Bodies fall to the ground
at a determined rate of speed: the determination of this rate is the law
of their fall.

2. What is the real effective power which produces the phenomenon? This
is the inquiry after the cause.

3. What is the intention which presided at the production of the
phenomenon? This is the search after the object, which philosophers call
the final cause.

What we call understanding or explaining a fact, is answering these
three questions; it is finding the law, the cause, the end. This
analysis was made by Aristotle, and seems to have been well made. The
science of nature, as it is conceived by the moderns, does not undertake
to satisfy entirely the desires of the human mind. It confines itself
to the first question; it classes phenomena; it then seeks their law;
arrived at this, it stops. The cause and design of things remain out of
the sphere of its investigations; the question of God therefore
continues foreign to it.

A story is told that when Buonaparte expressed his astonishment that the
Marquis de la Place could have written a large book on the system of the
universe, without making any mention of the Creator, the learned
astronomer replied to his sovereign: "Sire, I had no need of that
hypothesis." The answer is admissible if we regard only the science of
nature. An astronomer has no need of God in order to follow out the
series of his calculations, and compare their results with the course of
the stars; a chemist has no need of God in order to ascertain the simple
elements combined in composite bodies; a natural philosopher has no need
of God in order to determine the laws of waves of sound o