FOSSIL PEDIGREES 71 



shave with Occam's Razor would eliminate creation altogether, 

 since all theologians cheerfully admit that it was the result 

 of a free and unnecessary act on the part of God. When we 

 apply our rationes convenientiae to the Divine operations, we 

 must not make the mistake of applying them to the Divine 

 action itself instead of the created effects of that action. We 

 may be competent to discern disorder and irregularity in finite 

 things, but we are wholly incompetent to prescribe rules for 

 Divine conduct. To say that God is constrained by His in- 

 finite Wisdom to indirect, rather than direct, production, or 

 that He must evolve a variety of forms out of living, rather 

 than non-living, matter, is to be guilty of ridiculous anthro- 

 pomorphism. There is no a priori reason, founded upon the 

 Divine attributes, which restricts God's creative action to the 

 production of this, or that, number of primordial organisms, 

 or which obliges him to endow primitive organisms with the 

 power of transmutation. 



But the fact that these rationes convenientiae fail to estab- 

 lish the a priori necessity of a unification of organic origins 

 in space, does not imply that they are without value in sug- 

 gesting the unification of organic origins in time. Order and 

 regularity are not excluded by spatial multiplicity, but they 

 may easily be excluded by the incongruities of an irregular 

 succession of events. Indeterminism and chance are, indeed, 

 inseparable from the course of Nature. There is in matter an 

 unlimited potentiality, incommensiu-ate with the limited effi- 

 cacy of natural agencies. Hence it evades the absolute control 

 of all finite factors and forces. But the anomalies and ir- 

 regularities, which are contingent upon the limitation or frus- 

 tration of second causes unable to impose an iron necessity 

 upon evasive matter, are not referable to the First 'Cause, but 

 rather to the finite efficacy of second causes. Such anomalies 

 in natural processes, consequently, are not inconsistent with in- 

 finite wisdom and power on the part of the Creator. If, on the 

 contrary, the anomaly occurs, not in the form of an accidental 

 frustration of a natural agency, but in the form of an intrusive 



