sibilities.

"If shapeless creatures had never existed, you would not fail to insist
that none will ever appear, and that I am throwing myself headlong into
chimerical hypotheses. But the order is not even now so perfect, but
that monstrous products appear from time to time."[70]

We have here a distinct enough conception, though in an exceedingly
undigested shape, first, of incessant Variability in organisms as an
actual circumstance, which we may see exemplified in its extreme form in
the monstrous deviations of structure that occur from time to time
before our own eyes; second, of Adaptation to environment as the
determining condition of Survival among the forms that present
themselves. Even as a bald and unsustained guess, this was an effective
side-blow at the doctrine of final causes--a doctrine, as has been often
remarked, which does not survive, in any given set of phenomena, the
reduction of these phenomena to terms of matter and motion.

"I conjecture then," continues Saunderson, enlarging the idea of the
possibilities of matter and motion, "that in the beginning when matter
in fermentation gradually brought our universe bursting into being,
blind creatures like myself were very common. But why should I not
believe of worlds what I believe of animals? How many worlds, mutilated
and imperfect, were peradventure dispersed, then re-formed, and are
again dispersing at each moment of time in those far-off spaces which I
cannot touch and you cannot behold, but where motion combines and will
continue to combine masses of matter, until they have chanced on some
arrangement in which they may finally persevere! O philosophers,
transport yourselves with me on to the confines of the universe, beyond
the point where I feel, and you see, organised beings; gaze over that
new ocean, and seek across its lawless, aimless heavings some vestiges
of that intelligent Being whose wisdom strikes you with such wonder
here!

"What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions.
All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift
succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish;
a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now
with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I
might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your
own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an
ephemeral insect might ju