THE MECHANICAL CONCEPTION OF NATURE. 223 



show a tendency to confine their arguments to the organic 

 world, omitting the confessedly mechanical, which is by far 

 the larger part of the universe ; as if they supposed that a 

 dead world is not sufficient to prove a living and intelligent 

 God. But the order of the cosmos, the original characters 

 and harmonies of the many millions and millions of atoms, 

 and their relation to energy, their capacities for continuing 

 in extraordinary yet definite and well regulated ways, all 

 point to the necessity of going beyond them for their com- 

 mon origin. If the question of their origin does not properly 

 belong to physical science, it certainly has an important 

 place in philosophy and in the region of human faith, and 

 thus has a claim on the attention of every man, and we can- 

 not rest till we reach some unifying hypothesis, like that of 

 the Divine Personality. Behind this hypothesis we cannot 

 go, since all genetic lines lolien traced backward lead to it as 

 the ultimate cause. The order of the universe may have 

 been evolved according to Laplace's theory ; but why were 

 the molecules so constituted and so situated as to come 

 naturally into this order ? here the wisdom and will and 

 power of the Author are all shown. So strong is this argu- 

 ment that all who reject it are compelled either to fall back 

 on something which involves greater difficulties, or to evade 

 the issue by pleading Agnosticism. The mechanical theory 

 does not dispense with the argument for theism, any more 

 than the successful working of a machine negatives its pro- 

 duction by an inventor and its control by a superintendent. 

 Even when it works imperfectly we may not in a dysteleo- 

 logical way argue from its defects that it had no inventor. 

 Hence it does not exhaust the case to declare that a steam 

 engine has a complete explanation of its going in its own 

 mechanism, the fuel and water included, so that if these had 

 all come together by accident it could still go, and if by 

 similar accident rails were on the road, it could guide itself 

 without having a horse in advance, not to pull it, but to 

 direct its course, as {fide Lyell) the inventor of the locomo- 

 tive at first proposed. Yet most surely the perfection of the 

 mechanism would not debar us from endeavouring to find its 

 inventor and director. It is objected that Ave should see the 

 finger marks of the engineer in his work, and in rectifying 

 its aberrations. But nobody has ever detected the finger 

 marks by which our own mind governs our brain and our 

 bodily organism ; and it is improbable that God is more 

 clumsy in His methods than is the spirit of man. 



