ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE. 205 



general arrangement of the solar system would be due, and not to 

 hazard. 



If any one has ever maintained that the universe is a pure throw of 

 the dice, the theologians have abundantly refuted him. " How often," 

 says Archbishop Tillotson, " might a man, after he had jumbled a set 

 of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would 

 fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in 

 prose ! And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this 

 great volume of the world ? " The chance world here shown to be so 

 different from that in which we live would be one in which there were 

 no laws, the characters of different things being entirely independent ; 

 so that, should a sample of any kind of objects ever show a prevalent 

 character, it could only be by accident, and no general proposition 

 could ever be established. Whatever further conclusions we may come 

 to in regard to the order of the universe, thus much may be regarded 

 as solidly established, that the world is not a mere chance-medley. 



But whether the world makes an exact poem or not, is another 

 question. When we look up at the heavens at night, we readily per- 

 ceive that the stars are not simply splashed on to the celestial vault ; 

 but there does not seem to be any precise system in their arrangement 

 either. It will be worth our while, then, to inquire into the degree of 

 orderliness in the universe ; and, to begin, let us ask whether the world 

 we live in is any more orderly than a purely chance-world would be. 



Any uniformity, or law of Nature, may be stated in the form, 

 " Every A is B ; " as, every ray of light is a non-curved line, every body 

 is accelerated toward the earth's centre,, etc. This is the same as to 

 say, "There does not exist any A which is not B;" there is no curved 

 ray ; there is no body not accelerated toward the earth ; so that the 

 uniformity consists in the non-occurrence in Nature of a certain com- 

 bination of characters (in this case, the combination of being A with 

 being non-B). 1 And, conversely, every case of the non-occurrence of 

 a combination of characters would constitute a uniformity in Nature. 

 Thus, suppose the quality A is never found in combination with the 

 quality C : for example, suppose the quality of idiocy is never found in 

 combination with that of having a well-developed brain. Then nothing 

 of the sort A is of the sort C, or everything of the sort A is of the sort 

 non-G (or say, every idiot has an ill-developed brain), which, being 

 something universally true of the A's, is a uniformity in the world. 

 Thus we see that, in a world where there were no uniformities, no logi- 

 cally possible combination of characters would be excluded, but every 

 combination would exist in some object. But two objects not identical 

 must differ in some of their characters, though it be only in the char- 

 acter of being in such-and-such a place. Hence, precisely the same 



1 For the present purpose, the negative of a character is to be considered as much a 

 character as the positive, for a uniformity may either be affirmative or negative. I do 

 not say that no distinction oan be drawn between positive and negative uniformities. 



