on that the elements of matter, being eternal,
must pass through infinite combinations, and that one of these must be our
present world--a special collocation among the countless millions of
collocations, past and future. Throw the letters of the Greek alphabet, it
has been said, an infinite number of times, and you must produce the
'Iliad' and all the Greek books. The theory of probabilities, I need hardly
say, requires us to believe nothing so absurd.... But what is the 'Iliad'
to the hymn of creation and the drama of providence?" &c.

Now this I conceive to have been a fully valid argument at the time it was
published, and indeed the most convincing of all the arguments in favour of
Theism. But, as already so frequently pointed out, the considerations
adduced in Chapter IV. of the present work are utterly destructive of this
argument. For this argument assumes, rightly enough, that the only
alternative we have in choosing our hypothesis concerning the final
explanation of things is either to regard that explanation as Intelligence
or as Fortuity. This, I say, was a legitimate argument a few months ago,
because up to that time no one had shown that strictly natural causes, as
distinguished from chances, could conceivably be able to produce a cosmos;
and although the several previous writers to whom Professor Flint
alludes--and he might have alluded to others in this
connection--entertained a dim anticipation of the fact that natural causes
might alone be sufficient to produce the observed universe, still these dim
anticipations were worthless as _arguments_ so long as it remained
impossible to suggest any natural _principle_ whereby such a result could
have been conceivably effected by such causes. But it is evident that
Professor Flint's time-honoured argument is now completely overthrown,
unless it can be proved that there is some radical error in the reasoning
whereby I have endeavoured to show that natural causes not only _may_, but
_must_, have produced existing order. The overthrow is complete, because
the very groundwork of the argument in question is knocked away; a third
possibility, of the nature of a necessity, is introduced, and therefore the
alternative is no longer between Intelligence and Fortuity, but between
Intelligence and Natural Causation. Whereas the overwhelming strength of
the argument from Order has hitherto consisted in the supposition of
Intelligence as the one and only conceivable cause of th