sibility is a rock which no demand for completeness in Science
can crush. All attempts at reconciling the mechanical firmness of an
unbroken law of uniformity with the voice within that cannot be silenced
telling us that we must answer for our action, have failed, and we know
that they will for ever fail.

If indeed it could be said that the progress of Science was really
barred by this inability to make the induction complete, and to assert
the unbroken uniformity of all nature; if it could be said that any
uncertainty was thus cast over scientific conclusions, or any false or
misleading lights thus held up to draw inquirers from the true path, it
would undoubtedly become a duty to examine, and to examine anxiously,
whether indeed it could be true that our faculties were thus hopelessly
at variance with each other, the scientific faculty, imposing on us one
belief, and the spiritual faculty another, and the two practically
irreconcileable. But there is no reason whatever for thinking this.
Newton's investigations were unquestionably pursued, as all true
scientific investigations must ever be pursued, in reliance on the truth
of the uniformity of nature, and yet he never felt it the slightest
hindrance to his progress that he always tacitly and often expressly
acknowledged that God had reserved to Himself the power of setting this
uniformity aside, and indeed believed that He had used this power. The
believer who asserts the universality of a law except when God works a
miracle to set it aside is certainly at no real disadvantage in
comparison with an unbeliever who makes the same assertion with no
qualification at all. It is granted on all hands that miracles are, and
ever have been, exceedingly rare, and for that reason need not be taken
into account in the investigation of nature. It is granted that the
freedom of the human will works within narrow limits, and very slowly
and slightly affects the great mass of human conduct and what depends on
human conduct. And Science has often to deal with approximations when
nothing but approximations can be obtained. We perpetually meet in
nature with quantities and relations that cannot be accurately expressed
nor accurately ascertained, and we have to be content with
approximations, and we know how to use them in Science. Many chemical
properties can only be so expressed; many primary facts, such as the
distances, the volumes, the weights of heavenly bodies; and yet the
approx