412 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



throw which he announces in advance. I judge differently, ladies and 

 gentlemen. I say that nature's dice are cogged, and there, above, is 

 the greatest of jugglers making sport of us." 



What reply was, on the spot, made to the abbe we know not. But 

 of the impression which the apologue of the cogged dice made on the 

 encyclopaedists we learn something from a passage in the " Systeme de 

 la Nature," that work which, in the opinion of the young Goethe and 

 his Strasburg associates, was " senile, cimmerian, cadaverous, the very 

 quintessence of senility, offensive to all correct taste, nay, insipid." 

 And yet it is not to be denied that the " Systeme de la Nature," in 

 most points, very nearly represents the idea of the universe now held by 

 scientific men. 



In that work Holbach vainly squirms to escape from the snare in 

 which he had been caught by the Neapolitan. "The molecules of 

 matter," says he, " may be likened to cogged dice, i. e., they always pro- 

 duce certain effects of a determinate kind. Inasmuch as these molecules 

 are in themselves and by their combinations essentially diverse, we may 

 say that they are cogged in infinitely diversified ways. The brain of 

 Homer or of Virgil was nothing but an aggregate of molecules, or if 

 you please of cogged dice — i. e., things so constituted and so elaborated 

 that they must of necessity produce an Iliad or an JEneid." 



To say nothing of the fact that Holbach speaks of mental phenom- 

 ena being produced by material conditions as of a self-evident propo- 

 sition, nothing could be more awkward than the mode in which he 

 strives to wrest the weapon from the hand of his opponent. By adopt- 

 ing the comparison of the molecules of matter with cogged dice, he 

 unwittingly admits that in nature, just as in a gambler's den, there is 

 trickery ; whereas the problem before him was to explain how material 

 particles not directed toward any definite end should nevertheless co- 

 operate to that end. 



Here is the knot, here the enormous difliiculty, that racks every 

 linderstanding that would comprehend the universe. Whoever will 

 not surrender all occurrences into the hand of Epicurus's Chance, who- 

 ever admits even the veriest tittle of the doctrine of teleology, must 

 perforce accept Paley's disparaged natural theology, and this the more 

 inevitably the more clearly and accurately he reasons, the more inde- 

 pendently he exercises his judgment. But so weighty and so numerous 

 are the facts which seem to favor teleology ; so irresistibly do these 

 facts daily force themselves upon us in common life ; so interwoven are 

 final causes with time-honored imaginations of our race instilled into 

 us during childhood, that even minds possessed of considerable powers 

 of abstraction can not in their habitual thoughts refrain from postulating 

 them. A man may, with Lichtenberg, ridicule the teleological explana- 

 tions offered in earlier times. Be he ever so determined to regard the 

 processes occurring in the animal body simply as effects produced b}'^ 

 the mechanical or chemical organs, and so to represent them to others, 



