that the eliminated guidance and
control can philosophically be reintroduced.

This, I gather, may have been the chief motive of a critical examination
of the foundations of Physics by an American author, J. B. Stallo, in a
little book called the _Concepts of Physics_. But the worst of that
book was that Judge Stallo was not fully familiar with the teachings of
the great physicists; he appears to have collected his information from
popular writings, where the doctrines were very imperfectly laid down; so
that some of his book is occupied in demolishing constructions of straw,
unrecognisable by professed physicists except as caricatures at which
they also might be willing to heave an occasional missile.

The armoury pressed into the service of Professor James Ward's not
wholly dissimilar attack on Physics is of heavy calibre, and his
criticism cannot in general be ignored as based upon inadequate
acquaintance with the principles under discussion; but still his
Gifford lectures raise an antithesis or antagonism between the
fundamental laws of mechanics and the possibility of any intervention
whether human or divine.

If this antagonism is substantial it is serious; for Natural
Philosophers will not be willing to concede fundamental inaccuracy or
uncertainty about their recognised and long-established laws of motion,
when applied to ordinary matter; nor will they be prepared to tolerate
any the least departure from the law of the conservation of energy,
when all forms of energy are taken into account. Hence, if guidance
and control can be admitted into the scheme by no means short of
undermining and refuting those laws, there may be every expectation
that the attitude of scientific men will be perennially hostile to the
idea of guidance or control, and so to the efficacy of prayer, and to
many another practical outcome of religious belief. It becomes
therefore an important question to consider whether it is true that
life or mind is incompetent to disarrange or interfere with matter at
all, except as itself an automatic part of the machine,--whether in
fact it is merely an ornamental appendage or phantasmal accessory of
the working parts.

Now experience--the same kind of experience as gave us our scheme of
mechanics--shows us that to all appearance live animals certainly can
direct and control mechanical energies to bring about desired and
preconceived results; and that man can definitely will that those
results sha