The God whom science
recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who
does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate
his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on
the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and
unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves
are like those bubbles--epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe,
ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh nothing and
determine nothing in the world's irremediable currents of events.
[334] How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like
Christian Wolff, in whose dry-as-dust head all the learning of
the early eighteenth century was concentrated, should have
preserved such a baby-like faith in the personal and human
character of Nature as to expound her operations as he did in his
work on the uses of natural things? This, for example, is the
account he gives of the sun and its utility:--
"We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable
conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures,
men and beasts, may inhabit its surface.
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