164 The Three Beginnings. 



it tells us truly, then the law is the controlling 

 Power, and has a priority over the powers 

 controlled. Then "the forces possessed by the 

 molecules" were at best subordinate and se- 

 condary: the "definite laws" alone were 

 primary and supreme. But laws never make 

 themselves. Who made these ? and who made 

 them thus distinctly " definite " ? 



But even their definiteness is not greater 

 than their complexity. And this complexity 

 immeasurably beyond our power of explora- 

 tion is everywhere adjusted to the attainment 

 of a common end. Who originated a com- 

 plexity so intricate, yet so illimitable ? Who 

 established this unvarying adjustment of it in 

 the very " first beginning " ? For we are now 

 asked to imagine space filled with a frictionless 

 fluid ; to suppose that some portions of this 

 fluid did somewhere, somehow, by some means, 

 at some time or other, become " rotational ; " 

 and that having by rotation gained rigidity, 

 they can now, by the latest triumphs of hydro- 

 dynamics, be " proved " to be indivisible and 

 indestructible. Let it be granted. Granted 

 that light, heat, sound, electricity, magnetism, are 

 molecular movements mutually transmutable ; 

 that arrested molar movement displays itself 

 as molecular movement ; that the pressure of 



