328 
necessarily implies the introduction of some other element 
besides that of uniform law. One arrangement may by its 
heterogeneity of structure and its different forces be de- 
veloped into another yet more varied, with nothing but law 
to direct it ; but that which is homogeneous can never become 
varied by law alone. Variety itself thus points to a higher 
origin than law. 
28. The fact is that it is a fallacy, indeed an absurdity, to 
suppose that physical laws of themselves determine results. 
In the first place, these depend on the arrangement of the 
antecedent causes ; the self-same laws will produce an infinite 
number of results, and these not only different, but contrary 
to one another, according as the arrangement is altered. To 
use the words, again, of Professor Jevons, “ The problem of 
creation was what a mathematician would call an indetermi- 
nate problem, and it was indeterminate in an infinitely infinite 
number of ways. Infinitely numerous and various universes 
might then have been fashioned by the various distribution of 
the original nebulous matter, though all the particles should 
obey the one law of gravity .” , . . “ Out of infinitely 
infinite choices which were open to the Creator that one 
choice must have been made which has yielded the universe 
as it now exists.” (. Principles of Science, ii. 434.) 
29. I do not feel certain that the eminent writer whose words 
1 use means here what his language seems to imply, that the 
exercise of will in the original constitution was of itself 
sufficient to determine the conditions of the universe ever 
after; for he condemns as a “ superficial and erroneous” 
notion, derived “ from false views of the nature of scientific 
inference,” the supposition that the course of nature is to be 
regarded as being determined by invariable principles of 
mechanics, and the idea that “ even if the origin of all 
things be attributed to an intelligent creative mind, that 
Being is to be regarded as having yielded up arbitrary power, 
and as being subject, like a human legislator, to the laws 
which He himself has enacted.”* 
30. However, let us for the moment suppose it possible 
* At the same time he says : “ We may safely accept as a satisfactory 
scientific hypothesis the doctrine so grandly put forth by Laplace, who 
asserted that a perfect knowledge of the universe as it existed at any given 
moment would give a perfect knowledge of what was to happen thenceforth 
and for ever after.” It may be a grand idea, but as it involves that which 
is a contradiction, the knowledge of infinite and infinitely varied causes and 
arrangements of causes, and the exercise of logical reasoning on all these, it 
is an idea which merely embarrasses the question. 
