HI LECTURES ON EVOLUTION 47 



which, although doubtless highly imperfect and 

 inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet 

 sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance 

 of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of 

 toilsome and often fruitless labour to enable man 

 to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phan- 

 tasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed 

 among her fluctuations, and what is regular among 

 her apparent irregularities ; and it is only compara- 

 tively lately, within the last few centuries, that 

 the conception of a universal order and of a definite 

 course of things, which we term the course of 

 Nature, has emerged. 



But, once originated, the conception of the con- 

 stancy of the order of Nature has become the 

 dominant idea of modern thought. To any person 

 who is familiar with the facts upon which that 

 conception is based, and is competent to estimate 

 their significance, it has ceased to be conceivable 

 that chance should have any place in the universe, 

 or that events should depend upon any but the 

 natural sequence of cause and effect. We have 

 come to look upon the present as the child of the 

 past and as the parent of the future ; and, as we 

 have excluded chance from a place in the universe, 

 so we ignore, even as a possibility, the notion of 

 any interference with the order of Nature. What- 

 ever may be men's speculative doctrines, it is quite 

 certain that every intelligent person guides his life 

 and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order 



