adduced in support of facts of a nature extraordinary, unexpected, or unheard-of, but still not having a character positively supernatural, the proof would be accepted as unexceptionable: the facts for certain. In appearance, it is merely the proof by witnesses of the Supernatural that is contested; whereas, in reality, the very possibility of the thing is denied that is sought to be proved. The question ought to be put as it really is, instead of such a solution being offered as is a mere evasion.

Lately, however, men of logical minds and daring spirits have not hesitated to speak more frankly and plainly. "The new dogma, they say, the fundamental principle of criticism, is the negation of the Supernatural. . . . Those still disposed to reject this principle have nothing to do with our books, and we, on our side, have no cause to feel disquietude at their opposition and their censure, for we do not write for them. And if this discussion is altogether avoided, it is because it is impossible to

enter into it without admitting an unacceptable proposition, namely, one which presumes that the Supernatural can in any given case be possible.*

I do not reproach the disciples of the school of Hume for having evinced greater timidity: if they attacked the Supernatural by a side way, not as being impossible in itself, but as being merely incapable of proof by human testimony, they did not do so designedly and with deceitful purpose. Let us render them more justice, and do them more honor. A prudent and an honest instinct held them back on the declivity upon which they had placed themselves; they felt that to deny even the possibility of the Supernatural was to enter at full sail into pantheism and fatalism, that is to say, was the same thing as at once dispensing with God and doing away with the

* Conservation, Révolution, et Positivisme, par M. Littré, Preface, p. xxvi, and the following pages-M. Havet, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Août, 1863.

free agency of man. good sense, withheld them from any such course. The fundamental error of the adversaries of the Supernatural is that they contest it in the name of human science, and that they class the Supernatural among facts within the domain of science, whereas the Supernatural does not fall within that domain, and the very attempt so to treat it has led, indeed, to its being entirely rejected.

Their moral sense, their

FOURTH MEDITATION.

THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE.

AN eminent moralist, who was at the same time not only a theologian, but a philosopher well versed in the physical sciences, I mean Dr. Chalmers, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and corresponding member of the Institute of France, wrote in his work on Natural Theology a chapter entitled, On man's partial and limited knowledge of divine things. The first pages are as follows:

"The true modern philosophy never makes more characteristic exhibition of itself, than at the limit which separates the known from the unknown. It is there that we behold it in a twofold aspect-that of the utmost deference and respect for all the findings of experience within this limit; that, on the other hand, of

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the utmost disinclination and distrust for all those fancies of ingenious or plausible speculation which have their place in the ideal region beyond it. To call in the aid of a language which far surpasses our own in expressive brevity, its office is 'indagare' rather than 'divinare. The products of this philosophy are copies and not creations. It may discover a system of nature, but not devise one. It proceeds first on the observation of individual facts; and if these facts are ever harmonized into a system, this is only in the exercise of a more extended observation. In the work of systematizing, it makes no excursion beyond the territory of actual nature-for they are the actual phenomena of nature which form the first materials of this philosophy—and they are the actual resemblances of these phenomena that form, as it were, the cementing principle, to which the goodly fabrics of modern science owe all the solidity and all the endurance that belong to them. It is this chiefly which distin