48 



change taking place without a cause, and action necessarily in- 

 volves change, so that spontaneity in matter is an impossibility.* 

 The idea of spontaneity in matter is not one of those physical 

 theories which, as Tyndall says, lie beyond experience, but is 

 yet derived by a process of abstraction from experience. No 

 process of abstraction can derive fi^om experience anything 

 which is contrary to the entire analogy of experience. Take 

 as an illustration of the impossibility of conceiving mere 

 matter capable of spontaneously evolving an object familiar to 

 us all — the human eye ; and I here borrow the words of one 

 of the most distinguished of modern naturalists, Professor 

 Pritchard : — " From what I know, through my own speciality, 

 both from geometry and experiment, of the structure of the 

 lenses of the human eye, I do not believe that any amount of 

 evolution extending through any amount of time, could have 

 issued in the production of that most beautiful and complicated 

 instrument, the human eye. The most perfect, and at the 

 same time the most difficult, optical contrivance known is the 

 powerful achromatic object-glass of a microscope ; its structure 

 is the long unhoped-for result of the ingenuity of many 

 powerful minds, yet in complexity and in perfection it falls 

 infinitely below the structure of the eye. Disarrange any one 

 of the curvatures of the many surfaces, or distances, or 

 densities of the latter; or, worse, disarrange its incompre- 

 hensible self-adaptive powers, the like of which is possessed 

 by the handiwork of nothing human, and all the opticians in 

 the world could not tell you what is the correlative alteration 

 necessary to repair it, and, still less, to improve it, as a natural 

 selection is presumed to imply .•'^f 



Tyndall himself is forced to admit that the structure of the 

 universe is an insoluble mystery; and Huxley, after placing 

 the dogma of " Atheistic materialism " in its strongest light, 

 says : — '' But, if it is certain that we can have no knowledge 

 of the nature of either matter or spirit, and that the notion of 

 necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly 

 legitimate conception of law, the materialistic position that 

 there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, 

 is as uttei'ly devoid of justification as the most baseless of 

 theological dogmas. '^ J I am content to leave the theory of 

 atomic, or Atheistic materialism, in the position thus assigned 

 to it by one of its most accomplished exponents. 



Here again we see that the solution of the gi-and problem 



* See Herbert Spencer, First Principles, pp. 32, seq. 

 + Paper read at Brighton, 1874. 

 X Lay Servionn, p. 144. 



