68 NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



duce of chance or not : I desire no greater cer- 

 tainty in reasoning than that by which chance is 

 excluded from the present disposition of the natu- 

 ral world. Universal experience is against it. 

 What does chance ever do for us ? In the human 

 body, for instance, chance, i. e. the operation of 

 causes without design, may produce a wen, a wart, 

 a mole, a pimple, but never an eye. Amongst in- 

 animate substances, a clod, a pebble, a liquid drop 

 might be ; but never was a watch, a telescope, an 

 organized body of any kind, answering a valuable 

 purpose by a complicated mechanism, the effect 

 of chance.^^ In no assignable instance hath such 

 a thing existed without intention somewhere. 



19 There is great inaccuracy, and indeed a very unpliilosophical 

 and superficial view of the subject in these observations upon 

 " chancey Chance is merely an abridged fonn of expressing our 

 ignorance of the cause or preceding event to which any given 

 event may be traced ; and nothing can be more inaccurate, or in- 

 deed more productive of serious errors in this very branch of 

 science, than to speak of chance as a substantive thing or power. 

 To take the most obvious instance : we say, in common parlance, 

 that the dice being shaken together, it is a matter of chance what 

 faces they will turn up ; but, if we could accurately observe their 

 position in the box before the shaking, the direction of the force 

 applied, its quantity, the number of turns of the box, and the curve 

 in wliich the motion was made, the manner of stopping the motion 

 and the line in which the dice were thrown out, the faces turned 

 up would be a matter of certain prediction, after a sufficient num- 

 ber of experiments had been made to correct the theory. It is only 

 because we take no heed of all these things that we are ignorant 

 what will be the event ; and the darkness in which we are respect- 

 ing the circumstances which regulate it, is called by the name of 

 chance. Nor is it correct to say, that this or anything else is done 



