r?2 MODERN IDEAS OF EVOLUTION 



profitable to consider here this positive evidence in 

 some of its departments. 



The agnostic may say that he is content to regard 

 all nature as a product of law, and that this, being 

 inexorable and unchangeable, excludes the idea of a 

 personal will. A little reflection will show that this 

 position is altogether untenable. The laws of nature 

 are in reality not powers or forces at all, but merely 

 j the ways in which energy has been found to act. 

 They are mental generalisations of our own ; and the 

 fact that we are able to form these and to understand 

 nature by their means goes to show the harmony 

 between our mental nature and that of their Author, 

 and so to tell us something of Him. They do not 

 reveal to us the ultimate nature of energy, but merely 

 the mode of its action in whatever way it may have 

 been determined at first. 



Nor are such laws necessary. We can imagine 

 them to have been different. They may be different 

 in parts of the universe inaccessible to us. They may 

 even change in process of time. Nor is law at all 

 the reverse of rational will. On the contrary, a world 

 without law or regulated by caprice would be intoler 

 able to rational beings. 



Viewed in this way, the theistic conception of law 

 is that it is a voluntary limitation of the power of the 

 Creator in the interest of His creatures. To secure 

 this end, nature must be a perfect machine, all the 

 parts of which are adjusted for permanent and har- 



