As to the particular cases adduced, we are so perfectly fair-minded as to be willing to help your case as far as we can.  You are quite mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny that water may be turned into wine.  Many very competent judges are already inclined to think that the bodies, which we have hitherto called elementary, are really composite arrangements of the particles of a uniform primitive matter.  Supposing that view to be correct, there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple.  If the so-called “elements,” oxygen and hydrogen, which compose water, are aggregates of the same ultimate particles, or physical units, as those which enter into the structure of the so-called element “carbon,” it is obvious that alcohol and other substances, composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, may be produced by a rearrangement of some of the units of oxygen and hydrogen into the “element” carbon, and their synthesis with the rest of the oxygen and hydrogen.

Theoretically, therefore, we can have no sort of objection to your miracle.  And our reply to the levitators is just the same.  Why should not your friend “levitate”?  Fish are said to rise and sink in the water by altering the volume of an internal air-receptacle; and there may be many ways science, as yet, knows nothing of, by which we, who live at the bottom of an ocean of air, may do the same thing.  Dialectic gas and wind appear to be by no means wanting among you, and why should not long practice in pneumatic philosophy have resulted in the internal generation of something a thousand times rarer than hydrogen, by which, in accordance with the most ordinary natural laws, you would not only rise to the ceiling and float there in quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to “still-vexed Bermoothes,” and twit Ariel, if he happens to be there, for a sluggard?  We have not the presumption to deny the possibility of anything you affirm; only, as our brethren are particular about evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may save us from being roared down by their inextinguishable laughter.

Enough of the realism which clings about “laws.”  There are plenty of other exemplifications of its vitality in modern science, but I will cite only one of them.

This is the conception of “vital force” which comes straight from the philosophy of Aristotle.  It is a fundamental proposition of that philosophy that a natural object is composed of two constituents—­the one its matter, conceived as inert or even, to a certain extent, opposed to orderly and purposive motion; the other its form, conceived as a quasi-spiritual something, containing or conditioning the actual activities of the body and the potentiality of its possible activities.