half seriously, in the person as it were
of an imaginary correspondent, to this effect:

"I should like to hear what you would say if a theologian addressed you
as follows:

"'I grant you the attraction of gravity, persistence of force (or
conservation of energy), and one kind of matter, though the latter is
an immense addition, but I maintain that God must have given such
attributes to this force, independently of its persistence, that under
certain conditions it develops or changes into light, heat,
electricity, galvanism, perhaps into life.

"'You cannot prove that force (which physicists define as that which
causes motion) would invariably thus change its character under the
above conditions. Again, I maintain that matter, though it may be in
the future eternal, was created by God with the most marvellous
affinities, leading to {43} complex definite compounds, and with
polarities leading to beautiful crystals, etc., etc. You cannot prove
that matter would necessarily possess these attributes. Therefore you
have no right to say that you have "demonstrated" that all natural laws
necessarily follow from gravity, the persistence of force, and
existence of matter. If you say that nebulous matter existed
aboriginally and from eternity, with all its present complex powers in
a potential state, you seem to me to beg the whole question.'

"Please observe it is not I, but a theologian, who has thus addressed
you, but I could not answer him."[10]

The alternatives to Design, _i.e._, to the recognition of directive
activity, would be Necessity or Chance. From both of these the deepest
instincts of humanity--which in such matters are as fully to be relied
on as its logical faculty--strongly recoil. No one has spoken out more
strongly about the first than Huxley did.

"What is the dire necessity and 'iron' law under which you groan?" he
asks. "Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears. I suppose if there
be an 'iron' law, it is that of gravitation; and if {44} there be a
physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the
ground.... But when, as commonly happens, we change _will_ into
_must_, we introduce an idea of necessity which most assuredly does not
lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover.
For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematise the intruder.... The
notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the
perfectly legitimate conception of law;