Religion and Science
3. The Mechanical Interpretation of the Universe
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nineteenth century. It was then that Helm Holtz
declared that ‘the final aim of all natural science is
to resolve itself into mechanics,’ and Lord Kelvin
confessed that he could understand nothing of
which he could not make a mechanical model ... It
was the age of the engineer-scientist, whose
primary ambition was to make mechanical models
of the whole of nature.
Although scientists had not yet succeeded in
explaining all of the manifestations of this universe
according to this principle, this want of success
failed to shake the belief that the universe must in
the last resort admit of a purely mechanical
interpretation. It was felt that only greater efforts
were needed, and the whole of inanimate nature
would at last stand revealed as a perfectly acting
machine.
All this had an obvious bearing on the
interpretation of human life. Each extension of the
law of causation, and each success of the
mechanical interpretation of nature, made the belief
in free-will more difficult. For if all nature obeyed
the law of causation, why should life be exempt?
