SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 29 *- T 



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, the Differential Calculus, the music of Handel, A 

 the paintings of Botticelli, internal combustion ? 

 engines, wireless telegraphy, all the poetry of a 

 Wordsworth, all the wonderful inventions of a 

 Kelvin. All these things and a thousand more as 

 wonderful, the Law of Natural Selection without 

 a spark of intelligence behind it this perfectly 

 aimless action of physical forces all these things 

 it has accomplished; This is the demand which is 

 made upon our powers of belief by those who 

 deny the existence of an intelligent Author of 

 the universe, and attempt to put forward an ex- 

 planation of the existence of things as they are. 

 Natural Selection, if it be a law of nature, as we 

 are assuming it to be, must be either the product 

 of mechanical forces acting at random, or it must 

 proceed from an intelligent Lawgiver. There is no 

 middle term, since, as we have seen, there is in 

 the last abstraction nothing between believing in 

 a Being a Lawgiver Who is something in Him- 

 self apart from the world, and believing in a mere 

 abstraction from, or generalization of, natural 

 laws or processes, and that, apart from a Lawgiver, 

 means nothing more than blind chance. '< t'tiX^vu* 



In a letter published in the London Times, in 

 connection with the alternatives just discussed, J 

 Lord Kelvin, in maintaining that there was no 

 middle choice open to us, narrated a conversation 

 which he had once had with the great chemist 

 Liebig. When walking with him in the country, 

 Sir William Thomson, as he then was, asked Liebig ^'; " 

 whether he believed that the grass and the flowers *' 

 which were all round them grew by chemical 



