INVOLUTION 425 



these words of the Master of Balliol. The follow- 

 ing passage from Martineau may be fitly placed 

 beside them : — " In not a few of the progressionists 

 the weak illusion is unmistakable, that, with time 

 enough, you may get everything out of next-to- 

 nothing. Grant us, they seem to say, any tiniest 

 granule of power, so close upon zero that it is not 

 worth begrudging — allow it some trifling tendency 

 to infinitesimal movement — and we will show you 

 bow this little stock became the kosmos, without 

 ever taking a step worth thinking of, much less 

 constituting a case for design. The argument is a 

 mere appeal to an incompetency in the human 

 imagination, in virtue of which magnitudes evading 

 conception are treated as out of existence ; and an 

 aggregate of inappreciable increments is simul- 

 taneously equated, — in its cause to nothings in its 

 effect to the whole of things. You manifestly want 

 the same causality, whether concentrated in a 

 moment or distributed through incalculable ages ; 

 only in drawing upon it a logical theft is more 

 easily committed piecemeal than wholesale. Surely 

 it is a mean device for a philosopher thus to crib 

 causation by hair-breadths, to put it out at com- 

 pound interest through all time, and then disown 

 the debt."i 

 * Martineau, Essays ^ Philosophical and Theological^ p. 141. 



