ogy, I assert with confidence that in the one principle of
the persistence of force we have a demonstrably harmonising principle,
whereby all the facts within our experience admit of being collocated under
one natural explanation, without there being the smallest reason to
attribute these facts to any supernatural cause.

But perhaps the immense change which these considerations must logically be
regarded as having produced in the speculative standing of the argument
from teleology will be better appreciated if I continue to quote from
Professor Flint's very forcible and thoroughly logical exposition of the
previous standing of this argument. He says:--

"To ascribe the origination of order to _law_ is a manifest evasion of the
real problem. Law is order. Law is the very thing to be explained. The
question is--Has law a reason, or is it without a reason? The unperverted
human mind cannot believe it to be without a reason."

I do not know where a more terse and accurate statement of the case could
be found; and to my mind the question so lucidly put admits of the direct
answer--Law clearly has a reason of a purely physical kind. And therefore I
submit that the following quotation which Professor Flint makes from
Professor Jevons, logical as it was when written, must now be regarded as
embodying an argument which is obsolete.

"As an unlimited number of atoms can be placed in unlimited space in an
unlimited number of modes of distribution, there must, even granting matter
to have had all its laws from eternity, have been at some moment in time,
out of the unlimited choices and distributions possible, that one choice
and distribution which yielded the fair and orderly universe that now
exists. Only out of rational choice can order have come."

But clearly the alternative is now no longer one between chance and choice.
If natural laws arise by way of necessary consequence from the persistence
of a single self-existing substance, it becomes a matter of scientific
(though not of logical) demonstration that "the fair and orderly universe
that now exists" is the one and only universe that, in the nature of
things, _can_ exist. But to continue this interesting passage from Dr.
Flint's work--interesting not only because it sets forth the previous
standing of this subject with so much clearness, but also because the work
is of such very recent publication.

"The most common mode, perhaps, of evading the problem which order pre