you admit the facts, because you believe yourself; when you do not admit like facts on the evidence of others, it is because you do not believe them, and not because the facts in their own nature exclude all evidence.

Suppose a man should tell you that he was come from the dead; you would be apt to suspect his evidence. But what would you suspect? That he was not alive, when you heard him, saw him, felt him, and conversed with him? You could not suspect this without giving up all your senses, and acting in this case as you act in no other. Here then you would question whether the man had ever been dead. But would you say that it is incapable of being made plain by human testimony that this or that man died a year ago ? It cannot be said. Evidence in this case is admitted in all courts perpetually. Consider it the other way. Suppose you saw a man publicly executed, his body afterwards wounded by the executioner, and carried and laid in the grave; that after this you should be told that the man was come to life again; what would you suspect in this case? Not that the man had never been dead, for that you saw yourself; but you would suspect whether he was now alive. But would you say, this case excluded all human testimony, and that men could not possibly discern whether one with whom they conversed familiarly was alive or no? On what ground could you say this? A man rising from the grave is an object of sense, and can give the same evidence of his being alive as any other man in the world can give. So that a resurrection considered only as a fact to be proved by evidence, is a plain case; it requires no greater ability in the witnesses than that they be able to distinguish between a man dead and a man alive; a point in which I believe every man living thinks himself a judge.

I do allow that this case and others of like nature require more evidence to give them credit than ordinary cases do. You may therefore require more evidence in these than in other cases; but it is absurd to say that such cases admit no evidence, when the things in question are manifestly objects of sense.

I allow farther that the gentleman has rightly stated the difficulty on the foot of common prejudice; and that it arises from hence, that such cases appear to be contrary to the course of nature. But I desire him to consider what this course of nature is.

Every man, from the lowest countryman to the highest

philosopher, frames to himself from his experience and observation a notion of a course of nature, and is ready to say of everything reported to him that contradicts his experience, that it is contrary to nature. But will the gentleman say that everything is impossible, or even improbable, that contradicts the notion which men frame to themselves of the course of nature ? I think he will not say it; and if he will, he must say that water can never freeze, for it is absolutely inconsistent with the notion which men have of the course of nature who live in the warm climates. And hence it appears that when men talk of the course of nature, they really talk of their own prejudices and imaginations, and that sense and reason are not so much concerned in the case as the gentleman imagines. For I ask, is it from the evidence of sense or the evidence of reason that people in warm climates think it contrary to nature that water should grow solid and become ice? As for sense, they see indeed that water with them is always liquid, but none of their senses tell them that it can never grow solid; as for reason, it can never so inform them, for right reason can never contradict the truth of things. Our senses then inform us rightly what the usual course of things is; but when we conclude that things cannot be otherwise, we outrun the information of our senses, and the conclusion stands on prejudice, and not on reason. And yet such conclusions form what is generally called the course of nature. And when men on proper evidence and information admit things contrary to this presupposed course of nature, they do not, as the gentleman expresses it, quit their own sense and reason, but in truth they quit their own mistakes and prejudices.

In the case before us, the case of the resurrection, the great difficulty arises from the like prejudice. We all know by experience that all men die and rise no more; therefore we conclude that for a dead man to rise to life again is contrary to the course of nature; and certainly it is contrary to the uniform and settled course of things. But if we argue from hence that it is contrary and repugnant to the real laws of nature, and absolutely impossible on that account, we argue without any foundation to support us either from our senses or our reason. We cannot learn from our eyes, or feeling, or any other sense, that it is impossible for a dead body to live again; if we learn it at all, it must be from our reason; and yet what one maxim of reason is contradicted by the supposition of a resurrection? For my own part, when I

consider how I live; that all the animal motions necessary to my life are independent of my will; that my heart beats without my consent and without my direction; that digestion and nutrition are performed by methods to which I am not conscious; that my blood moves in a perpetual round, which is contrary to all known laws of motion; I cannot but think that the preservation of my life, in every moment of it, is as great an act of power as is necessary to raise a dead man to life. And whoever so far reflects on his own being as to acknowledge that he owes it to a superior power, must needs think that the same power which gave life to senseless matter at first, and set all the springs and movements a-going at the beginning, can restore life to a dead body. For surely it is not a greater thing to give life to a body once dead, than to a body that never was alive.

(From the Same.)

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

[Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, on 25th December 1642. He was educated at Grantham and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1665. He had already begun to make discoveries in mathematics, and it was in 1666 that the fall of the famous apple suggested to him a rudimentary theory of gravitation. This was not however finally worked out until the Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica of 1687, and in the meantime he occupied himself largely with the phenomena of Light and Optics. He became a Fellow of Trinity in 1667, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1691, and its President in 1703. He always held his public duties higher than his scientific, championed his University against James II., sat in Parliament in 1689, and again for the University in 1701, and served as Master of the Mint from 1699. In 1703 he was knighted; died in 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The best edition of the Principia is that by Sir W. Thomson and Professor Blackburn (1871). His Optics were published in a Latin translation in 1706, his Optical Lectures in 1728, and his Treatise on Fluxions in 1736. He also wrote several pamphlets on theological subjects. His collected Works were edited by Horsley in 1779-1785. The student may consult Sir David Brewster's Life of Newton (1855), and Prof. Augustus de Morgan's Newton, his Friend, and his Niece (1885).]

IN the history of science, especially in its mathematical branches, the activity of Isaac Newton is one of the greatest epochs. A profundity of physical research, combined with a positive genius for the invention of new and fertile mathematical methods, enabled him to accomplish once for all the determination of that vast system of cosmic laws at which generations of explorers Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler- had been vaguely labouring. Subsequent investigation in the same field has been but the elaboration of principles which he laid down. With Aristotle and Darwin he stands in the front rank of the torchbearers of luminous theory.

Newton has indeed but little direct claim to rank among