not to burden the text with details, I have presented these
reflections in their most general terms. Thus, if it be granted that cosmic
harmony results from the combined action of general laws, and that these
laws are the necessary result of the primary qualities of force and matter,
this the most general statement of the atheistic position includes all more
special considerations as a genus includes its species; and therefore it
would not signify, for the purposes of the atheistic argument, whether or
not any such more special considerations are possible. Nevertheless, for
the sake of completeness, I may here observe that we are not wholly without
indications in nature of the physical causation whereby the effect of
cosmic harmony is produced. The universal tendency of motion to become
rhythmical--itself, as Mr. Spencer was the first to show, a necessary
consequence of the persistence of force--is, so to speak, a conservative
tendency: it sets a premium against natural cataclysms. But a more
important consideration is this,--that during the evolution of natural law
in the way suggested in Chapter IV., as every newly evolved law came into
existence it must have been, as it were, grafted on the stock of all
pre-existing natural laws, and so would not enter the cosmic system as an
element of confusion, but rather as an element of further progress. For
instance, when, with the origin of organic nature, the law of natural
selection entered upon the cosmos, it was grafted upon the pre-existing
stock of other natural laws, and so combined within them in unity. And a
little thought will show that it was impossible that it should do
otherwise; for it was impossible that natural selection could ever produce
organisms which would ever be able by their existence to conflict with the
pre-existing system of astronomic or geologic laws; seeing that organisms,
being a product of later evolution than these laws, would either have to be
adapted to them or perish. And hence the new law of natural selection,
which consists in so adapting organisms to the pre-existing laws that they
must either conform to them or die. Now, I have chosen the case of natural
selection because, as alluded to in the text, it is the law of all others
which is the most conspicuously effective in producing the harmonious
complexity of nature. But the same kind of considerations may be seen to
apply to most of the other general laws with which we are acquainted,
part