intrusion of atheism into the sciences of observation is veiled beneath
confusions of ideas which it is of importance for us to dissipate.

Modern science, as we have said, stops at laws, without troubling itself
with causes. The laws which determine the series of facts as they offer
themselves to observation express the mode of the action of the causes.
There are here two ideas absolutely distinct: the power which acts, and
the manner in which it acts. If the naturalist thinks that his science
is everything, he must conclude that we can know nothing beyond the
laws, and that an insuperable ignorance hides from our view the power of
which they express the action. But he rarely succeeds in keeping this
position, and deceives his reason by confounding the laws which he
discovers with the causes with which his mind is not able to dispense.
He says first of all with Franchi, "the universe is what it is"; this is
the general formula of all the truths of experience; then he adds with
the same author, "it is because it is." This _because_ means nothing, or
means that laws are their own causes. If it is asked, What is the cause
of the motion of the stars? they will give for answer the astronomical
formulæ which express this motion, and will think that they have
explained the phenomena by stating in what way they present themselves
to observation. This is a curious example of that confusion of ideas
which opens the door to atheism.

An English naturalist, Mr. Darwin, has shown that in the successive life
of animal generations, the favorable variations which are produced in
the organization of a being are transmitted to its descendants and
insure the perpetuity of its race, while the unpropitious variations
disappear because they entail the destruction of the races in which they
are produced. He tells us: "This preservation of favorable variations
and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural