Which answer eventually the positive school will choose, and which answer men in general will accept, I make as I have said before, no attempt to answer.  My only purpose to show is, that if man has any moral being at all, he has it in virtue of his immaterial will—­a force, a something of which physical science can give no account whatever, and which it has no shadow of authority either for affirming or for denying; and further, that if we are not prevented by it from affirming his immaterial will, we are not prevented from affirming his immortality, and the existence of God likewise.

And now I come to that third point which I said I should deal with here, but which I have not yet touched upon.  Every logical reasoner who admits the power of will must admit not only the possibility of miracles, but also the actual fact of their daily and hourly occurrence.  Every exertion of the human will is a miracle in the strictest sense of the word; only it takes place privately, within the closed walls of the brain.  The molecules of the brain are arranged and ordered by a supernatural agency.  Their natural automatic movements are suspended, or directed and interfered with.  It is true that in common usage the word miracle has a more restricted sense.  It is applied generally not to the action of man’s will, but of God’s.  But the sense in both cases is essentially the same.  God’s will is conceived of as disturbing the automatic movements of matter without the skull, in just the same way as man’s will is conceived of as disturbing those of the brain within it.  Nor, though the alleged manifestations of the former do more violence to the scientific imagination than do those of the latter, are they in the eye of reason one whit more impossible.  The erection of a pyramid at the will of an Egyptian king would as much disturb the course of nature as the removal of a mountain by the faith of a Galilean fisherman; whilst the flooding of the Sahara at the will of a speculating company would interfere with the weather of Europe far more than the most believing of men ever thought that any answer to prayer would.

It will thus be seen that morality and religion are, so far as science goes, on one and the same footing—­of one and the same substance, and that as assailed by science they either fall together or stand together.  It will be seen too that the power of science against them resides not in itself, but in a certain intellectual fulcrum that we ourselves supply it with.  That its methods can discover no trace of either of them, of itself proves nothing, unless we first lay down as a dogma that its methods of discovery are the only methods.  If we are prepared to abide by this, there is little more to be said.  The rest, it is becoming daily plainer, is a very simple process; and what we have to urge against religion will thenceforth amount to this.  There is no supernatural, because everything is natural; there is no spirit, because everything is matter; or there is no air, because everything is earth; there is no fire, because everything is water; a rose has no smell because our eyes cannot detect any.