374 RELIGIOUS VIEWS.

science which views these things, not with refe- rence to time or space, 0r mechanical causation, not with reference to fluid or ether, nervous irritability 0r corporeal feeling, but to their own proper modes of conception; with reference to the relations with which it is possible that these notions may be connected, and not to relations suggested by other subjects of a completely ex- traneous and heterogeneous nature. And ac- cording to such relations must the laws of the moral world be apprehended, by any intelli- gence which contemplates them at all.

There can be no wider interval in philosophy than the separation which must exist between the laws of mechanical force and motion, and the laws of free moral action. Yet the tendency of men to assume, in the portions of human knowledge which are out of their reach, a simi- larity of type to those with which they are fami- liar, can leap over even this interval. Laplace has asserted that “ an intelligence which, at a given instant, should know all the forces by which nature is urged, and the respective situa- tion of the beings of which nature is composed, if, moreover, it were sufficiently comprehensive to subject these data to calculation, would in- elude in the same fornzula, the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the slightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain to such an intelligence, and the future, no less than the past, would be present to its eyes.” If