434 THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 



the consequent results of the law of gravitation must 

 have been entirely a matter of free choice. 



Chalmers has most distinctly pointed out that the 

 existing collocations of the material world are at least 

 as important as the laws which the objects obey. He 

 remarks that a certain class of writers entirely over- 

 look the distinction, and forget that mere laws without 

 collocations would have afforded no security against a 

 turbid and disorderly chaos b . Mr. J. S. Mill has recog- 

 nised the truth of Chalmers' statement, without draw- 

 ing the proper inferences from it. He says d of the dis- 

 tribution of matter through space, 'We can discover 

 nothing regular in the distribution itself; we can reduce 

 it to no uniformity, to no law/ More lately the Duke 

 of Argyle in his well known work on the 'Reign of Law* 

 has drawn attention to the profound distinction between 

 laws and collocations of causes. 



The original conformation of the material universe was, 

 so far as we can possibly tell, free from all restriction. 

 There was unlimited space in which to frame it, and an 

 unlimited number of material particles, each of which 

 could be placed in any one of an infinite number of 

 different positions. It must also be added that each 

 particle might be endowed with any one of an infinite 

 number of degrees of vis viva acting in any one of an 

 infinitely infinite number of different directions. /The 

 problem of Creation was, then, what a mathematician 

 would call an indeterminate problem, and it was ^inde- 

 terminate in an infinitely infinite number of ways. In- 

 finitely numerous and various universes might then 

 have been fashioned by the various distribution of the 



b 'First Bridgwater Treatise' (1834), pp. 16-24. 



c ' System of Logic/ 5th edit. bk. III. chap. V. 7. Chap. XVI 3. 



d Ibid. vol. i. p. 384. 



