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viduality, as assert that the order of nature is that of an 
invariable succession of events. 
It can make no reasonable impression against this truth to 
say that “ if we only knew all the antecedents ” of any conse- 
quent we should find that it had occurred according to an 
invariable order of succession. This is but a begging of the 
question, and that in the most beggarly way — of insisting on a 
conclusion in the face of myriads of contradicting facts. If the 
same antecedents had always been followed by the same con- 
sequents, progress from the most simple to the most complicated 
forms of being would have been utterly impossible. As really 
as water is always formed when one part of hydrogen and eight 
of oxygen combine, so would the same results have always 
followed the same antecedents, and one invariable round must 
have been the only history of nature. But the indisputable 
facts of science, especially of geological science, demonstrate 
that this has not been the case. Variety of result has been the 
great law of life. Invariableness has been that of inorganic 
changes exclusively, and that is shown us only when we confine 
our attention to purely inorganic movements. 
When, therefore, we are told that the changes in the natural 
world take place according to an invariable order of succession, 
and that this is the fixed law of nature, we are told what is 
transparently untrue. If such a statement is made in the name 
of scientific culture, it is made by one who is himself ignorant 
of some of the most irresistible conclusions of science, or who is 
oblivious to that very “ law of variation ” of which scientific 
men of the first class have tried to make so much. Such an 
invariable order of succession in nature, when brought to bear 
against prayer and its answer by God, is nothing but a frail 
fallacy, paraded in the face of eternal truth. The claim to 
“ culture,” to science, or to philosophy, which is associated 
with this folly, is a claim which is seriously deteriorated by 
that with which it is thus allied. 
Here we come naturally upon that part of our wide subject 
where we distinguish in a more careful manner between that 
in which results are uniform and that in which they are not 
so. In the strictly material region effects occur in chains, so 
to speak. The creation of a first link is never a solitary 
occurrence. It involves other occurrences that are evolved in 
succession when the first takes place. Material objects are so 
connected that it is impossible to move one without also 
moving others as a consequence of that movement. In mind, 
considered in its capability of will, the case is otherwise. 
Everything may be moved round about that mind in its 
volitional capability, and yet that will may be still. This is 
