INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 5 
And here, therefore, that which arranges and combines 
the molecules is a power acting with a definite purpose. 
* - * The other view is, that the fundamental 
powers of organised bodies agree essentially with those 
of inorganic nature,—that they work altogether blindly 
according to the laws of necessity irrespective of any 
purpose,—that they are powers which are as much 
established with the existence of matter as the physical 
powers are.”’ 
It cannot be denied that adaptation to a particular 
purpose is characteristic of every organism, but the source 
of this adaptation does not depend upon each organism 
being developed by the operation of its own power in 
obedience to that purpose, ‘‘ but it originates, as in inor- 
ganic nature, in the creation of the matter with its blind 
9? 
powers by a rational Being.’’ The evidence of design is 
quite as great in the inorganic as in the organic world. 
‘““We know, for instance, the powers which operate in our 
planetary system. ‘They operate hke all physical powers 
in accordance with blind laws of necessity, and yet is the 
planetary system remarkable for its adaptation to a 
purpose. ‘The ground of this adaptation does not lie in 
the powers but in Him who has so constituted matter 
with its powers that in blindly obeying its laws it pro- 
duces a whole suited to fulfil an intended purpose. In 
physics all those explanations which were suggested by a 
teleological view of nature, as the ‘horror of a vacuum,’ 
have long since been discarded. But when we speak of 
the inflammation and suppuration which removes a 
foreign body, as an effort of the organism to remove the 
foreign body, or as a proof of the ‘autocracy’ of the 
organism, or of the ‘vis medicatriz,’ that is as little of 
an explanation according to the physical view as it would 
be to say that the motion of the earth around the sun is 
