ts main and essential features, as one
of his original discoveries; for the general idea on which it rests had
been announced with equal brevity and precision by the celebrated LA
PLACE: "Let us survey the history of the progress of the human mind and
of its errors; we shall there see _final causes constantly pushed back
to the boundaries of its knowledge_. These causes, which Newton pushed
back to the limits of the solar system, were, even in his time, placed
in the atmosphere to explain meteoric appearances. They are nothing
else, therefore, in the eyes of a philosopher, than _the expression of
our ignorance of the true causes_." Supposing this to be a correct
account of the fact, the inference which M. Comte deduces from it might
seem to follow very much as a matter of course,--the inference, viz.,
that in proportion as Science advances and succeeds in subjecting one
department of Nature after another to fixed and invariable laws,
Theology, or the doctrine of Final Causes, must necessarily recede
before it, and, at length, disappear altogether, when human knowledge
has reached its highest ultimate perfection. But is it a correct account
of the fact? Is it true that the doctrine of Final Causes is less
generally admitted, or more dubiously maintained, in regard to those
sciences which have already reached their maturity, than in regard to
those other sciences which are still comparatively in their infancy? Or
is it true that it has lost instead of gaining ground by the progress of
scientific discovery, so as to occupy a narrower space and to hold a
more precarious footing, _now_, than it did in the earlier ages of
ignorance and superstition? Did Final Causes disappear from the view of
Newton when he discovered the law which regulates the movements of the
heavenly bodies? Did Galen or did Paley discard them when they surveyed
the human frame in the light of scientific anatomy? or Harvey, when,
impelled and guided by this doctrine as his governing principle, he
discovered the circulation of the blood? In what departments of Nature,
and in what branches of Science, does the Theistic philosopher or the
Christian divine find the clearest and strongest proofs of order,
adaptation, and adjustment? Is it not in those very departments of
Nature whose laws have been most fully ascertained? in those very
branches of Science which have been most thoroughly matured? Did we
believe Comte and La Place, we should expect to find that th