o know something about
this; and how good were it, if any ingenious person would find out the
cause of such phaenomena, and thence educe a general remedy for
them. Such an ingenious person was Count Rumford;[47] and he and
his successors have landed us in the theory of the persistence, or
indestructibility, of force. And in the infinitely minute, as in the
infinitely great, the seekers after natural knowledge of the kinds
called physical and chemical, have everywhere found a definite order and
succession of events which seem never to be infringed.

And how has it fared with "Physick" and Anatomy? Have the anatomist,
the physiologist, or the physician, whose business it has been to devote
themselves assiduously to that eminently practical and direct end,
the alleviation of the sufferings of mankind,--have they been able to
confine their vision more absolutely to the strictly useful? I fear they
are the worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set before
us the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the
duration of the universe; if the physical and chemical philosophers have
demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and
the practical eternity of matter and of force; and if both have alike
proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order and
succession of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all
these, but have added more startling theses of their own. For, as the
astronomers discover in the earth no centre of the universe, but an
eccentric [48] speck, so the naturalists find man to be no centre of the
living world, but one amidst endless modifications of life; and as the
astronomers observe the mark of practically endless time set upon
the arrangements of the solar system so the student of life finds the
records of ancient forms of existence peopling the world for ages,
which, in relation to human experience, are infinite.

Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as dependent for its
manifestation of particular molecular arrangements as any physical or
chemical phenomenon; and wherever he extends his researches, fixed order
and unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in the rest of
Nature.

Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion.
Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and
interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has
taken the intellectual cover