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odds against its being sufficient) from the scientific point of 
view. 
Another theory by which it is sought to explain the marks 
of final causation in nature, is that of blind, natural necessity. 
Matter and force, it is claimed, are known by us, and are 
known to be eternal and inseparable. The forces inherent in 
matter, it is maintained, are few in number ; are, in fact, 
reducible to two, attraction and repulsion, and their necessary, 
undirected action is alleged to be sufficient to account, together 
with matter, for the universe as known to us. 
The allegation is false. Science, as we have seen, knows 
nothing of matter, or of force ; and the latter conception, in 
particular, she eliminates entirely from among the number of 
her valid or constitutive conceptions, retaining it only as an 
auxiliary or regulative idea, which represents nothing really 
known to science. The notion, therefore, of matter as the 
seat of inherent forces is not a scientific one, in the ordinary 
“ positive” acceptation of the term “ scientific.” 
Again, admitting the materialistic notion of matter, with its 
two inhering forces of attraction and repulsion, an immense 
induction remains to be accomplished, before it can be shown 
that these suffice for the explanation of the world (more espe- 
cially of the organic world).* It must be shown that every- 
where in the universe only these forces operate, and that they 
follow and have followed only their own (assumed) blindly, 
necessary laws. The demonstration, to be absolutely complete 
would obviously require what is physically impossible, since so 
infinitesimal a portion of the universe only is accessible to our 
direct inspection. The limits even to our possible knowledge 
of the earth, both in its present condition and in its past 
history, are, plainly, extremely narrow. Still, where all is and 
must be largely theory, it would be manifestly unjust not to be 
satisfied, if the materialistic hypothesis could be verified in a 
few typical instances. If, for example, the morphology of a 
single natural organism were explicable by the hypothesis in 
question — if it could account for definite symmetry in organic 
proportions (pi'oportions represented by numerical ratios, and 
hchce themselves representing a harmony, i.e. something 
ideal), it might with some show of reason be alleged as a true 
* For the present, as, among others, Herbert Spencer points out, we 
suffer under a “ total lack of information respecting the infinitely- varied and 
involved causes that have been at work,” not only in the evolution of the 
higher forms of organic life, but, we may also add, in the world-process in 
general. See Spencer’s Psychology , new cd. § 208, note. 
