2 o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or 243 characters, as we have seen that the notion of a chance-world 

 requires, there would, in fact, be no less than 2 33 , or 4,294,967,296 

 characters, which would not be all independent, but would have all pos- 

 sible relations with one another. 



We further see that so long as we regard characters abstractly, 

 without regard to their relative importance, etc., there is no possibility 

 of a more or less degree of orderliness in the world, the whole system 

 of relationship between the different characters being given by mere 

 logic ; that is, being implied in those facts which are tacitly admitted 

 as soon as we admit that there is any such thing as reasoning. 



In order to descend from this abstract point of view, it is requisite 

 to consider the characters of things as relative to the perceptions and 

 active powers of living beings. Instead, then, of attempting to im- 

 agine a world in which there should be no uniformities, let us suppose 

 one in which none of the uniformities should have reference to charac- 

 ters interesting or important to us. In the first place, there would be 

 nothing to puzzle us in such a world. The small number of qualities 

 which would directly meet the senses would be the ones which would 

 afford the key to everything which could possibly interest us. The 

 whole universe would have such an air of system and perfect regular- 

 ity that there would be nothing to ask. In the next place, no action 

 of ours, and no event of Nature, would have important consequences in 

 such a world. We should be perfectly free from all responsibility, and 

 there would be nothing to do but to enjoy or suffer whatever happened 

 to come along. Thus there would be nothing to stimulate or develop 

 either the mind or the will, and we consequently should neither act 

 nor think. We should have no memory, because that depends on a law 

 of our organization. Even if we had any senses, we should be situated 

 toward such a world precisely as inanimate objects are toward the pres- 

 ent one, provided we suppose that these objects have an absolutely 

 transitory and instantaneous consciousness without memory a suppo- 

 sition which is a mere mode of speech, for that would be no conscious- 

 ness at all. We may, therefore, say that a world of chance is simply 

 our actual world viewed from the standpoint of an animal at the very 

 vanishing-point of intelligence. The actual world is almost a chance- 

 medley to the mind of a polyp. The interest which the uniformities of 

 Nature have for an animal measures his place in the scale of intelli- 

 gence. 



Thus, nothing can be made out from the orderliness of Nature in 

 regard to the existence of a God, unless it be maintained that the 

 existence of a finite mind proves the existence of an infinite one. 



III. 



In the last of these papers we examined the nature of inductive or 

 synthetic reasoning. We found it to be a process of sampling. A 

 number of specimens of a class are taken, not by selection within that 



