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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



combination of characters could not be found in two different objects ; 

 and, consequently, in a chance-world every combination involving either 

 the positive or negative of every character would belong to just one 

 thing. Thus, if there were but five simple characters in such a world, 1 

 we might denote them by A, B, C, D, E, and their negatives by a, b, 

 c, d, e ; and then, as there would be 2 6 or 32 different combinations of 

 these characters, completely determinate in reference to each of them, 

 that world would have just 32 objects in it, their characters being as in 

 the following table : 



Table I. 



For example, if the five primary characters were hard, siceet, fra- 

 grant, green, bright, there would be one object which reunited all 

 these qualities, one which was hard, sweet, fragrant, and green, but not 

 bright ; one which was hard, sweet, fragrant, and bright, but not 

 green ; one which was hard, sweet, and fragrant, but neither green nor 

 bright ; and so on through all the combinations. 



This is what a thoroughly chance-world would be like, and certainly 

 nothing could be imagined more systematic. "When a quantity of let- 

 ters are poured out of a bag, the appearance of disorder is due to the 

 circumstance that the phenomena are only partly fortuitous. The laws 

 of space are supposed, in that case, to be rigidly preserved, and there 

 is also a certain amount of regularity in the formation of the letters, 

 The result is that some elements are orderly and some are disorderly, 

 which is precisely what we observe in the actual world. Tillotson, in 

 the passage of which a part has been quoted, goes on to ask, "How 

 long might 20,000 blind men, which should be sent out from the sev- 

 eral remote parts of England, wander up and down before they would 

 all meet upon Salisbury Plains, and fall into rank and file in the exact 

 order of an army ? And yet this is much more easy to be imagined 

 than how the innumerable blind parts of matter should rendezvous 

 themselves into a world." This is very true, but in the actual world 

 the blind men are, as far as we can see, not drawn up in any particular 

 order at all. And, in short, while a certain amount of order exists 

 in the world, it would seem that the world is not so orderly as it 



1 There being 5 simple characters, with their negatives, they could be compounded 

 in various ways so as to make 241 characters in all, without counting the characters 

 existence and non-existence, which make up 243 or 3 5 . 



