Introduction to science / by Alex Hill.

  • Alexander Hill
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introduction to science / by Alex Hill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    fall into two or more groups, the members of each of which have more in common with one another than they have with those in the other groups. New proximate laws will then be formulated within the law of gravitation. The docket “ law of gravitation ” will be subdivided, and the new dockets will include a greater number of phenomena than the “law” as now formulated can be made to do. Not only did the writer of Natural Law in the Spiritual World mistake the meaning and value of law, but he was curiously obtuse to the trend of his own arguments. He found that an investigation of the spiritual world, as Christians understand it, shows that its “ laws ” are similar to those which man has formulated for the phenomena of nature. Mr Drummond found that in the supernatural world as revealed in the Bible, the laws with which we are familiar in the physical world hold sway. Had he found other laws—laws which have no counterpart in nature—he would have dis¬ covered a new line of evidence of the existence of the spiritual world. This new world, with its own laws, would be clearly an independent, self-sufficient world and not merely, as sceptics assert it to be, a reflection of the physical world—the projection of man’s experience. “ But,” says Mr Drummond, “What is required to draw Science and Religion together again—for they began the centuries hand in hand—is the disclosure of the naturalness of the super¬ natural.” “ The position we have been led to take up is not that the Spiritual Laws are analogous to the Natural Laws, but that they are the same Laws. It is not a question of analogy but of Identity. The Laws of the invisible are the same Laws, projections of the natural, not the super¬ natural.” “ God made man in his own image,” says the Bible. “ Man made God in his own image,” answers Comte. Clearly, there is no third alternative. Either our religion is based upon a revelation of God, or it is our own invention. Nevertheless it may be that both statements are true. God made Man in His own image, and implanted in him the in-
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