Dr. Carpenter, the President of the British Association in its
'session last month at Brighton,—ought not to have had to explain, as he was compelled to do, to an evening contemporary of last Saturday's date, that the drift of his able address was not theo- logical, but strictly scientific, and was in no degree directed against the philosophy of Professors Tyndall and Huxley. The real drift of the address was to vindicate for what is called physical science the right of going beyond the mere generalisation of phenomena into so-called laws (i.e., rules of registered succession), —to assert our actual knowledge of one external reality, force,—and the very high probability that all the forms of force, no less bodily forms than mental, are one in essence and origin, though so amazingly various in the phases in which they are pre- sented to us in the world. No doubt this, though keeping close in the strictest sense to the evidence of science, has a clear bear- ing on theology, because if all we know of force shows that mental and physical forces are convertible, the force distributed -through the universe must have mental capacities, and may there- fore be, as all ages have suspected, of purely mental origin. It is not, however, Di. Carpenter's fault as a man of science if his strictly scientific teaching turns out to have a theological bearing. It was to miss the whole meaning of his address to attribute to
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