MR. GLADSTONE AND GENESIS. 799 



" forming," of that which already exists. Now, it appears to me that 

 the scientific investigator is wholly incompetent to say anything at all 

 about the first origin of the material universe. The whole power of 

 his organon vanishes when he has to step beyond the chain of natural 

 causes and effects. No form of the nebular hypothesis that I know of 

 is necessarily connected with any view of the origination of the nebu- 

 lar substance. Kant's form of it expressly supposes that the nebular 

 material from which one stellar system starts may be nothing but the 

 disintegrated substance of a stellar and planetary system which has 

 just come to an end. Therefore, so far as I can see, one who believes 

 that matter has existed from all eternity has just as much right to 

 hold the nebular hypothesis as one who believes that matter came into 

 existence at a specified epoch. In other words, the nebular hypothesis 

 and the creation hypothesis, up to this point, neither confirm nor oppose 

 one another. 



Next, we read in the revisers' version, in which I suppose the ulti- 

 mate results of critical scholarship to be embodied : " And the earth 

 was waste [without form, in the authorized version] and void." Most 

 people seem to think that this phraseology intends to imply that the 

 matter oixt of which the world was to be formed was a veritable " chaos " 

 devoid of law and order. If this interpretation is correct, the nebular 

 hypothesis can have nothing to say to it. The scientific thinker can 

 not admit the absence of law and order, anywhere or any when, in 

 nature. Sometimes law and order are patent and visible to our lim- 

 ited vision ; sometimes they are hidden. But every particle of the 

 matter of the most fantastic-looking nebula in the heavens is a realm 

 of law and order in itself, and that it is so is the essential condition 

 of the possibility of solar and planetary evolution from the apparent 

 chaos.* 



*' Waste " is too vague a term to be worth consideration. " With- 

 out form," intelligible enough as a metaphor, if taken literally, is ab- 

 surd ; for a material thing existing in space must have a superficies, 

 and if it has a superficies it has a form. The wildest streaks of raare's- 

 tail clouds in the sky, or the most irregular heavenly nebulae, have 

 surely just as much form as a geometrical tetrahedron ; and as for 

 " void," how can that be void which is full of matter ? As poetry, 

 these lines ai-e vivid and admirable ; as a scientific statement, which 

 they must be taken to be if any one is justified in comparing them 

 with another scientific statement, they fail to -convey any intelligible 

 conception to my mind. 



The account proceeds : " And darkness was upon the face of the 

 deep." So be it ; but where, then, is the likeness to the celestial 

 nebulae, of the existence of which we should know nothing unless 



* When Jeremiah (iv, 23) says, " I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void," 

 he certainly does not mean to imply that the form of the earth was less definite, or its 

 Bubstance less solid, than before. 



