36 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



creation of the world out of nothing ; but if we substitute 

 a homogeneous ether, it is difficult to realise how man's 

 mind could be potentially in it, if there be no Creative 

 Mind at all. " If it were," he proceeds, " as some fancy, 

 made by an assembly of atoms, there must be some 

 infinite intelligent Cause that made them, some cause 

 that separated them, some cause that mingled them 

 together for the fitting up so comely a structure as the 

 world. It is the most absurd thing to think they should 

 meet together by hazard, and rank themselves in that 

 order we see without a higher and a wise agent, so that 

 no creature could make the world. For supposing any 

 creature was formed before this visible world, and might 

 have a hand in disposing things, yet he must have a 

 cause of himself, and must act by the virtue and 

 strength of another, and this is God," ^ 



So now, if atoms are vortex-rings, whence came the 

 initial power to make the rings in ether ? Those atom- 

 rings were made in time, and if a nebula consist of 

 millions of glowing hot vortex-rings of hydrogen, whence 

 the " Directivity " '^ which has produced the planetary 

 order out of them ? Dr. Charnock then concludes his 

 argument : " To conclude this ; as when a man comes 

 into a palace, built according to the exactest rule of art, 

 and with an unexceptionable conveniency for the in- 



' op. cit., vol. i., p. 150. 



2 I am indebted to Prof. A. H. Church, F.R.S., for this very useful 

 and expressive word. It seems a better one than Jas. Croll's " Determin- 

 ing Power "referred to below and employed in his paper — What Determines 

 Molecular Motion, the Fundamental Prohlem of Nature ? Prof. Church 

 writes me, " I coined it many years ai;o to avoid the use of ' force,' 

 'energy,' etc., when describing in lectures on organic chemistry the 

 parallelism between the chemist directing in his laboratory physico- 

 chemical forces in the making of a true organic compound, and that 

 mysterious "something" which employs the same forces to make the 

 same compound in the plant or animal." 



