402 INDUCTION. 



the results of abstraction. Chance could make out as good a title to that dig 

 nity as many other of the mind s abstract creations : it had had a name given to 

 it, and why should it not be a reality ? As for rb avrofidrov, it is recognised 

 even yet as one of the modes of origination of phenomena, by all those thinkers 

 who maintain what is called the Freedom of the Will. The same self-deter 

 mining power which that doctrine attributes to volitions, was supposed by the 

 ancients to be possessed also by some other natural phenomena : a circumstance 

 which throws considerable light on more than one of the supposed invincible 

 necessities of belief. I have introduced it here, because this belief of Aristotle, 

 or rather of the Greek philosophers generally, is as fatal as the doctrines of 

 Thales and the Ionic school, to the theory that the human mind is compelled by 

 its constitution to conceive volition as the origin of all force, and the efficient 

 cause of all phenomena.* 



With regard to the modern philosophers (Leibnitz and the Cartesians) whom 

 I had cited as having maintained that the action of mind upon matter, so far from 



* It deserves notice that the parts of nature, which Aristotle regards as pre 

 senting evidence of design, are the Uniformities : the phenomena in so far as re 

 ducible to law. Tv^/; and TO avTopaTov satisfy him as explanations of the variable 

 element in phenomena, but their occurring according to a fixed rule can only, 

 to his conceptions, be accounted for by an Intelligent Will. The common, or 

 what may be called the instinctive, religious interpretation of nature, is there- 

 verse of this. The events in which men spontaneously see the hand of a super 

 natural being, are those which cannot, as they think, be reduced to a physical 

 law. What they can distinctly connect with physical causes, and especially what 

 they can predict, though of course ascribed to an Author of Nature if they 

 already recognise such an author, might be conceived, they think, to arise from 

 a blind fatality, and in any case do not appear to them to bear so obviously the 

 mark of a divine will. And this distinction has been countenanced by eminent 

 writers on Natural Theology, in particular by Dr. Chalmers : who thinks that 

 though design is present everywhere, the irresistible evidence of it is to be found 

 not in the laws of nature but in the collocations, i.e. in the part of nature 

 in which it is impossible to trace any law. A few properties of dead matter 

 might, he thinks, conceivably account for the regular and invariable succession 

 of effects and causes ; but that the different kinds of inatter have been so placed 

 as to promote beneficent ends, is what he regards as the proof of a Divine Pro 

 vidence. Mr. Baden Powell, in his Essay entitled &quot; Philosophy of Creation,&quot; 

 has returned to the point of view of Aristotle and the ancients, and vigorously 

 reasserts the doctrine that the indication of design in the universe is not 

 special adaptations, but Uniformity and Law, these being the evidences of mind, 

 and not what appears to us to be a provision for our uses. While I decline to 

 express any opinion here on this vexata qucestio, I ought not to mention 

 Mr. Powell s volume without the acknowledgment due to the philosophic spirit 

 which pervades generally the three Essays composing it, forming in the case 

 of one of them (the &quot;Unity of Worlds&quot;) an honourable contrast with the other 

 dissertations, so far as they have come under my notice, which have appeared 

 on either side of that controversy. 



