Agassiz has tracked the warm
foot-prints of Divinity throughout all the vestiges of creation.
There is danger, however, that, in accepting this doctrine as a truth,
we may be led into an inexact conception of the so-called physical
laws, unless we closely examine the sense in which we use the
expression. The forces which act according to these laws, and the
various forms of the so-called _matter_, or concrete forces, are
often spoken of as if they were blind agencies and existences, acting
by an inherent fate-like power of their own. But if everything
outside of our consciousness resolves itself, in the last analysis,
into force, or something capable of producing change, and if force
existing by the will of an omniscient and omnipresent Being, to whom
time has no absolute significance, is simply God himself in action,
then we shall find it impossible to limit the causal agency of the
physical forces. All we can say is, that commonly they appear to
move in certain rectilinear paths, in which they manifest a degree
of uniformity and precision so amazing that we are lost in the
infinite intelligence they display,--unless we become perfectly
stupid to it, and think, as in the old fable, there is no music in
it because we are made deaf by its continued harmony. No single leaf
ever made a mistake in falling, though in so doing it solved more
problems than were ever held in all the libraries that have changed
or are changing into dust or ashes.
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