Force does not admit of explanation, nor of proper definition, any more than the hypothetical substratum of matter.  If we assume the Infinite as omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, we cannot suppose Him excluded from any part of His creation, except from rebellious souls which voluntarily exclude Him by the exercise of their fatal prerogative of free-will.  Force, then, is the act of immanent Divinity.  I find no meaning in mechanical explanations.  Newton’s hypothesis of an ether filling the heavenly spaces does not, I confess, help my conceptions.  I will, and the muscles of my vocal organs shape my speech.  God wills, and the universe articulates His power, wisdom, and goodness.  That is all I know.  There is no bridge my mind can throw from the “immaterial” cause to the “material” effect.

The problem of force meets us everywhere, and I prefer to encounter it in the world of physical phenomena before reaching that of living actions.  It is only the name for the incomprehensible cause of certain changes known to our consciousness, and assumed to be outside of it.  For me it is the Deity Himself in action.

I can therefore see a large significance in the somewhat bold language of Burdach:  “There is for me but one miracle, that of infinite existence, and but one mystery, the manner in which the finite proceeds from the infinite.  So soon as we recognize this incomprehensible act as the general and primordial miracle, of which our reason perceives the necessity, but the manner of which our intelligence cannot grasp, so soon as we contemplate the nature known to us by experience in this light, there is for us no other impenetrable miracle or mystery.”

Let us turn to a branch of knowledge which deals with certainties up to the limit of the senses, and is involved in no speculations beyond them.  In certain points of view, human anatomy may be considered an almost exhausted science.  From time to time some small organ which had escaped earlier observers has been pointed out,—­such parts as the tensor tarsi, the otic ganglion, or the Pacinian bodies; but some of our best anatomical works are those which have been classic for many generations.  The plates of the bones in Vesalius, three centuries old, are still masterpieces of accuracy, as of art.  The magnificent work of Albinus on the muscles, published in 1747, is still supreme in its department, as the constant references of the most thorough recent treatise on the subject, that of Theile, sufficiently show.  More has been done in unravelling the mysteries of the fasciae, but there has been a tendency to overdo this kind of material analysis.  Alexander Thomson split them up into cobwebs, as you may see in the plates to Velpeau’s Surgical Anatomy.  I well remember how he used to shake his head over the coarse work of Scarpa and Astley Cooper,—­as if Denner, who painted the separate hairs of the beard and pores of the skin in his portraits, had spoken lightly of the pictures of Rubens and Vandyk.