steps of progress which we call means to a final result, the preliminary question of course always is, _What are the facts?_ and till these be accurately ascertained Bacon was fully justified in saying that speculation about final causes is a barren virgin and produces no offspring. But this wise abstinence from assigning final causes at any particular stage of physical research is a quite different thing from saying absolutely that there are no marks of design in the universe, and that those most obvious things which from Socrates downwards have been generally esteemed such, may in the phraseology of a higher philosophy “rank as happy coincidences.” The humble admiration of final causes in the world by the intelligent worshipper is one thing, the hasty interpretation of them by every forward religionist is another thing. The works of God are not to be expounded, nor His ends and aims descanted on by every talker who may discourse with fluent propriety on the works of a human toy-maker like himself. Such we may feel confidently was Bacon’s point of view in reference to teleological questions. As for Goethe, who was a scientific investigator of scarcely less note than a poet, his remark to Eckermann on this subject shows that his point of view was exactly the same. Not WHY, or FOR WHAT PURPOSE, or WITH WHAT OBJECT, he says, is the way of putting the question by which science may be profited; the true scientific question is always HOW. Of this there can be no doubt, “_Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere {84} causas!_” the physical inquirer is primarily concerned to know--_how did this come about?_ by what curiously concatenated series of operations, starting from a certain point beyond which we cannot rise, are certain results produced? Answer this and science is satisfied; but in being so satisfied it proves itself to be a thing of secondary and ancillary significance, resting, like the mathematician’s demonstrations, on principles which it belongs to a superior science to evolve. The whole doctrine of causes, efficient as well as final, belongs to philosophy, to that grand doctrine of fundamental realities which dictates to mere science both its starting-point and its goal. But not even in this view is it altogether correct to say that the consideration of design has nothing to do with purely scientific investigations, and by the purely scientific man had better be ignored. All we can say is, that it is better that it should be ignored in certain cases than falsely presumed. But in a world where everything is under the government of Law, which is merely the expression of reason and the manifestation of design, nothing could be more Arbitrary and more perverse than the systematic exclusion of final causes from the philosophy of nature. So far from this, it is certain there can be no philosophy of nature without them; if indeed atheism can be called a philosophy, and in this nineteenth century,