464 THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 



Any one of Mr. Darwin s books, admirable though they all 

 are, consists but in the setting forth of a multitude of 

 indeterminate problems. He proves in the most beautiful 

 manner that each flower of an orchid is adapted to some 

 insect which frequents and fertilizes it, and these adapta 

 tions are but a few cases of those immensely numerous 

 ones which have occurred throughout the life of plants 

 and animals. But why orchids should have been formed 

 so differently from other plants, why anything, indeed, 

 should be as it is, rather than in some of the other in 

 finitely numerous possible modes of existence, he can 

 never show. The origin of everything that exists is 

 wrapped up in the past history of the universe. At 

 some one or more points in past time there must have 

 been arbitrary determinations which led to the produc 

 tion of things as they are. 



Possibility of Divine Interference. 



I will now draw the reader s attention to pages 168-171 

 of the first volume. I there pointed out that all inductive 

 inference involves the assumption that our knowledge of 

 what exists is complete, and that the conditions of things 

 remain unaltered between the time of our experience and 

 the time to which our inferences refer. Recurring to the 

 illustration of a ballot-box, employed in the Chapter on 

 the Inverse Method of Probabilities, we assume when 

 predicting the probable nature of the next drawing, that 

 our previous drawings have been sufficiently numerous to 

 give us nearly complete knowledge of the contents of the 

 box ; and, secondly, that no interference with the ballot- 

 box takes place between the previous and the next draw 

 ings. The results yielded by the theory of probabilities 

 are quite plain. No finite number of casual drawings can 

 give us sure knowledge of the contents of the box, so that, 



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