74 The Bible of Nature 



apparent simplicity — a nebula becomes an intri- 

 cate earth; we see a higher order emerging out of 

 a lower — a system of sun and planets is established; 

 we see a multitude of parts working together with 

 the smoothness of a well-made machine; we see 

 what we call beauty and what, if we had been the 

 makers of the history, we should certainly have 

 called progress. It is very wonderful. And yet, 

 in a certain sense, are we not warranted in saying 

 that Nature has made herself what she is, i.e., 

 that any particular result is the natural prede- 

 termined predictable outcome of the antecedent 

 conditions ? Few feel any particular necessity for 

 invoking the aid of a deus ex machina to account 

 for the frost-flowers seen on the window-pane on 

 a winter morning — which, in fairy-like beauty, re- 

 main for a brief space as external reminiscences of 

 the evening talk — but each spray of that frosty 

 pane is molecularly as complex as the Milky Way 

 seems to our eyes. It has been said that the unde- 

 vout astronomer is mad, but Laplace was as 

 astronomer quite right in saying in answer to 

 Napoleon's famous question regarding God, that 

 he had no need of that hypothesis. He was right, 

 in the first place, because science is a perfectly 

 definite business of formulating sequences in 

 terms of sense-experience, and is false to its task 

 when it obscures its deficiencies by interpolating 

 formulse of an entirely different order. And he 



