Daily Inspiration Quote by Elisha Gray

Gray is doing a neat rhetorical judo move: he borrows the emotional voltage of "miracle" and then quietly disarms it with "rule of law". Coming from an inventor in the late 19th century - a period drunk on telegraphs, patents, and the idea that tomorrow could be engineered - the line reads like a defense of wonder inside a worldview that’s becoming aggressively technical. He’s anticipating the heckler in the audience: the person who hears "miracle" and smells superstition. So he concedes the charge ("unscientific") only to flip it. The miracle isn’t a violation of nature; it’s that nature is so reliably lawful that it can produce astonishment on schedule.

The subtext is less about theology than about branding science as emotionally survivable. Industrial modernity had a reputational problem: it could explain things, but did it still let you feel anything? Gray insists yes. His "paradox" bridges two impulses that often get staged as enemies: reverence and mechanism. By calling natural operations "wonderful things subservient to the rule of law", he gives the reader permission to be floored by reality without abandoning rationality.

Context matters: inventors lived at the intersection of abstract law (physics) and human law (patents, property, progress). Gray’s phrasing nods to both. If the universe runs on rules, it can be understood, reproduced, and improved upon - which is exactly the inventor’s faith. Wonder, here, isn’t anti-science; it’s science’s best advertisement.