282 
ORDINARY MEETING-, January 21, 1884. 
The Right Hon. A. S. Ayrton, in the Chair. 
The following paper was read by the author : — 
HOW DID THE WORLD EVOLVE ITSELF? By 
Sir Edmund Beckett, Bart., LL.D., Q.C. 
I AM asked — probably on account of my little book “ On 
tbe Origin of the Laws of Nature”* — to write a Paper 
on wbat may be called “ Undesigned Cosmogony,” or the pro- 
duction of the world and all that is therein without the 
“Intelligent Author” that even Hume believed in, though 
he believed little or no more about Him. I there discussed 
that alternative to Creation which is commonly called Mate- 
rialism, or the “ potentiality of self-existing matter,” or 
“self-existing energy” and automatic Laws of Nature; 
which all practically come to the same thing, however their 
advocates may try to evade it — viz., that the ultimate atoms 
of Matter resolved for themselves by universal suffrage from 
the beginning of all things how they would act for ever in 
all possible circumstances, distributing themselves first into 
groups of the sixty-three elements, or whatever may be their 
number, and somehow acquiring the multitude of properties 
respectively belonging to them. 
Laws of nature are only laws of motion for every kind of 
atom in all possible circumstances ; and they differ from the 
three mathematical “ axioms or laws of motion ” established 
by Newton, in that those are necessary a 'priori truths,! but 
the laws of natural motions, or of nature, are statements of 
* S.P.C.K., 2nd Ed., 1880. 
t See page 294. 
