what chance meant. "Very well," said the father, "look at your hands and your feet; consider your eyes and all your members. Are they not skilfully arranged? How did your hand get its shape?" The boy replied: "Somebody must have made my hands for me." "Who is that some one?" said the father. "I do not know," said the child. "Do you feel certain that somebody planted these seeds, and sure that some one made your hands?" "Yes," said the boy, with great earnestness. And then the father communicated to the child the name of the great Being by whom all things are made, and the boy never forgot the lesson nor the circumstances which led to it.

Now I bring the materialist, or any one who doubts the validity of the argument from design to prove the existence of a God possessing intelligence, to this garden-plat. I say: "Will you explain for me the letters C. W. B. ?" The materialist replies: "I will do so, and can do so very easily, for the letters are explained by the powers in the seeds." "Let us hear your explanation in detail," I reply. "Very well," the materialist goes on to say, "there is a garden cress making the head of the letter C. Is not that garden cress accounted for by the seed from which it grows?" "Yes," I reply. "Here is a cress. making the neck of the C. Is not that accounted for by the seed from which it sprang?" "Yes," I say. And so he goes on through the fifty garden cresses that make up the letter. He accounts for each one of the cresses and then infers that he has accounted for the letter. I stop him, and say that to account for each one of those garden cresses is not at all to account for the arrangement of the cresses into the shape of the C. Why did they not arrange themselves as a W or a B, or in any other form, or in no form at all? You account for each one of the garden cresses, and think you have accounted for the letter. No, you have not; for there is a great distinction between the powers of these seeds to produce garden cresses and that power which collocated the seeds into the shape of the letter. Here is the distinction between the existence of the forces of matter and the direction of those forces.

Theists are ready to grant that wonderful powers have been given to atoms of matter, and that the molecular constitution of these substances which we touch and call inert is marvellous beyond all comment; but the question is whether any such powers have been given to atoms as to account for the direction of the forces that inhere in the atoms, and such a direction that, although these forces are active at ten thousand times ten billion discrete points, they all work together to a common end. The garden cresses account for each part of the letter, but do not account for the shape of the letter. Whoever

will look sharply at this illustration will see that the parts, if you take them without this idea of collocation, are not the whole, even if they are added together. He who takes up these garden cresses and holds them in his hand has not the whole letter C in his hand. Goethe said that he who holds in his palm the parts of a watch has not the whole watch, because he has not the form in which the parts must be put together in order to produce a mechanism to keep time.

President Allman, indeed, uses language that is philosophically careless. He says that "irritability has its seat in protoplasm, and is the prime mover of every phenomenon of life."* Objection may justly be taken to the word "prime" in this proposition. Mere irritability will never develop protoplasm into a rose, nor provide for man the finest of the wheat. In the problem of the origin of life there is a silent factor which Prof. Allman does not expressly recognize. The central question is:-What accounts for the variety of form in organisms? Not irritability alone, without the co-ordinating power called life. The claims of morphology cannot be satisfied without this immaterial principle, which Aristotle called the cause of form in organisms.

Kepler, the astronomer, was one day called by his wife from his study of the natural forces, to dinner, and a salad was laid on the table. "Dost thou think," said he to his spouse, " that, if leaves of lettuce and drops of oil and vinegar and fragments of hard-boiled eggs had been in circulation from eternity in chaos, that chance could have assembled them to-day to form a salad?" "Not as good a one as this," said his wife, "nor as well seasoned." †

Abbé Galliani, in Paris, once met a company of atheists in a Baron d'Holbach's parlour. "Now suppose, gentlemen," said he, "that the one among you who is most fully convinced that the world is the effect of chance"-I am reading you historic language-" is playing with three dice. I do not say in a gambling-house, but in the best house in Paris. His antagonist throws sixes, once, twice, three, four times—in a word, constantly. My friend Diderot will say, without a moment's doubt, that the dice are loaded. I am in a bad house. Because of ten or a dozen throws of the dice, you believe firmly that this is in consequence of trickery and combination, and well-planned combination; but, seeing in this universe so prodigious a number of combinations, a thousand times more complicated and complicated more usefully, you do not suspect that the dice of Nature

"Popular Science Monthly," October, 1879, p. 745. Fondateurs de l'Astronomie moderne."

† Bertrand, "Des

are loaded also, and that there is above them a great rogue, who takes pleasure in catching you atheists in your superficiality."

These familiar concrete examples emphasize the distinction made prominent by Chalmers, and after him by Mill, between the laws of matter and the collocations of matter. "We can imagine all the present and existing laws of matter to be in full operation," said Chalmers,+" and yet, just for want of a right local disposition of parts, the universe might be that wild, undigested medley of things in which no trace or character of a designing architect was at all discernible." Mr. Mill says ‡ that "collocations, as well as laws, are necessary to the operation of Nature," and he does not overlook the profound truth that "the laws of Nature do not account for their own origin."

A slovenly observation of facts, and a lack of rigour in applying to the explanation of facts the principle that every change must have an adequate cause, are the most ordinary sources of scepticism as to the existence of design in Nature. A specialist may be lynx-eyed and yet wall-eyed.

I take in my hand a book, and you say that the book is made by the laws of grammar. I say it is made according to the laws of grammar. You say the book of the universe is made by the laws of Nature. Carpenter replies that you must never affirm that the universe is governed by law; but that what you ought to say is, that it is governed according to law. This book is not made by law; it is made according to the laws of printing and grammar. I may have this type, and nothing but a chaotic mass of ink-spots upon the page. The collocation of them is the thing to be accounted for. The cutting of the face of the type is, indeed, wonderful, and that must be accounted for when we look sharply into the last analysis of things. Those atoms of which so much is said have the appearance, as Max Müller affirms, of manufactured articles. The question is, if they have all these marvellous powers which some materialists attribute to them, where they obtained them.

When I was crossing the Rocky Mountains, it was my fortune to find some moss agates, and the beautiful ferns inside, or the structures resembling ferns, were enswathed by the crystalline stone. Teach me haughtily the atomic theory, if you please; tell me that the ultimate particles of matter have power, I care not how marvellous: I reply that, according to physical science, these different particles never have touched cach other. They are enswathed by a "Natural Theology," II. 11.

Janet, "Final Causes," Book II., chap. 1. "Logic," III. 12-16.

force that accounts for their harmoniously co-ordinated motions, and which in all organisms must have acted to produce the adaptation of part to part. As the crystalline stone enswathes the mysterious growths in the moss agate, so a co-ordinating power enswathes all atoms and all worlds, and the universe is but a moss agate in the crystalline stone of God's omnipresent intelligence.

You say Concord theism runs into anthropomorphism-that is, that I teach that God is like man. Well, anthropomorphism is better than what I call hylomorphism-that is, the doctrine that God is like matter; and pantheism, when it makes all force only an outcome of certain powers inhering in the original atoms, is reducing our idea of what is highest in the universe to the level of matter and its forces, and is properly enough called, not anthropomorphic, indeed, but hylomorphic, which is a great deal more vile.

Is there in the universe intention not my own? Every one answers: "Yes; in other human beings." But precisely the same argument which proves to me that a human being other than myself has had an intention in any given work, proves that a Supreme Intelligence has had an intention in what is called Nature. It is inconsistent with sound doctrine for me to deny that other human beings have intentions. It is, for the same reason, inconsistent with sound doctrine for me to deny that the Supreme Intelligence has intentions, or that Nature has final as well as efficient cause. 1. Let cause mean all that is necessary to explain an effect.

2. In a statue of Hercules we shall have, therefore, according to Aristotle's distinctions between causes, first, a material cause in the marble; an efficient cause in the chisel of the sculptor; a formal cause in the shape of the statue; and a final cause in its destination to be set up to adorn a temple.

Here are the famous distinctions between material, efficient, formal, and final causes; and it is necessary that these definitions should be put before the public at large, if we are to come before it with anything like full statements of the freshest investigation of the proofs that God is a person. You must distinguish between the marble of the statue, the chisel that makes the statue, the shape of the statue, and the destination of the statue. All these circumstances are causes; but they are not causes in the same sense.

3. All these causes may co-exist. Neither in man's work nor in Nature does the operation of efficient causes shut out that of final

causes.

4. The fullest proof that the course of Nature is governed by efficient causes would be no disproof that it is also governed by final

1

causes. To prove that a statue is made by a chisel is no disproof that it was made in order to represent Hercules and to be set up in a temple.

5. It is the absurd claim of many physicists who have not studied philosophy that efficient and final causes exclude each other; but the better educated of physicists make no such claim.

Huxley says: "The teleological and mechanical views of Nature are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The teleologists can always defy the evolutionist to disprove that the primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe."

It is very important to insist upon the fact that material, efficient, formal, and final causes may co-exist. To prove that a fact of Nature is governed by an efficient cause is no disproof that it is also governed by a final cause. Nevertheless, we have hundreds of welleducated men, who think that if they have proof that the universe has been thrown into its present form by the action of the forces we call gravitation, chemical affinity, and the like, there is no proof that there is any design in the universe. If there is an efficient cause for any given effect, then they think there is no necessity for a final cause. That is like asserting that, because this statue of Hercules has been chiselled by a piece of steel, the efficient cause of the statue cannot have co-existed with an intention on the part of the maker to set up the work to adorn a temple. The great point to be insisted on in answering anti-theistic theories is that the material, the efficient, the formal, and the final causes of the universe may co-exist and do not come into collision at all.

6. Without here raising the question whether the theory of evolution is true or false, it is evident that it concerns only a question of process, or answers the question How, and not the question Why. 7. But the question How does not exclude the question Why, and so the theory of evolution does not render final causes either impossible or useless.

8. Combinations of repeated and multiplex phenomena-such that they converge to one effect-exist in countless numbers in Nature. 9. Convergence of phenomena in repeated and multiplex cases is itself a phenomenon and requires a cause.

10. When a certain coincidence of phenomena is remarked constantly, it is not enough to explain each phenomenon by referring it to its antecedent. It is necessary to give a precise reason for the coincidence itself.*

*See Janet," Final Causes," Book I., chapter 1, and Book II. chapter 1.