"That telescope which has opened our way to suns and systems innumerable, leaves the moral administration connected with them in deepest secrecy. It has made known to us the bare existence of other worlds; but it would require another instrument of discovery ere we could understand their relation to ourselves, as products of the same Almighty Hand, as parts or members of a family under the same paternal guardianship. This more extended survey of the Material Universe just tells us how little we know of the Moral or Spiritual Universe. {120} It reveals nothing to us of the worlds that roll in space, but the bare elements of Motion, and Magnitude, and Number--and so leaves us at a more hopeless distance from the secret of the Divine administration than when we reasoned of the Earth as the Universe, of our species as the alone rational family of God that He had implicated with body, or placed in the midst of a corporeal system. ... "To know that we cannot know certain things, is in itself positive knowledge, and a knowledge of the most safe and valuable nature. ... There are few services of greater value to the cause of knowledge than the delineation of its boundaries." [Footnote 22] [Footnote 22: Chalmers's Works: Natural Theology, pp. 249-265; Glasgow.] In holding this language, what in effect is Dr. Chalmers doing? He is separating what is finite from what is infinite, the thing created from the Creator, the world subject to government from the Sovereign that governs it; and in marking this line of demarcation, he says in his modesty to science, what God in his power says to the ocean: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." {121} Doctor Chalmers was right; the limits of the finite world are those also of human science: how far within these vast limits science may extend her empire, who shall affirm? But what we certainly may assert is, that she never can exceed them. The finite world alone is within her reach, the only world that she can fathom. It is only in the finite world that man's mind can fully grasp the facts, observe them in all their extent, and under all their aspects, discriminate their relations and their laws (which constitute also a species of facts), and so verify the system to which they should be referred. This it is that makes what we term scientific processes and labour, and human sciences are the results. What need to mention that in speaking of the finite world, I do not mean to speak of the material world alone? Moral facts there also are which fall under observation, and enter into the domain of science. {122} The study of man in his actual condition, whether considered as an individual or as forming a member of a nation, is also a scientific study, subject to the same method as that of the material world: and it is its legitimate province also to detect in the actual order of this world the laws of those particular facts to which it addresses itself.