The Indeterminate Problem of Creation.

A second and very serious misapprehension concerning the import of a law of nature may now be pointed out. It is not uncommonly supposed that a law determines the character of the results which shall take place, as, for instance, that the law of gravity determines what force of gravity shall act upon a given particle. Surely a little reflection must render it plain that a law by itself determines nothing. It is law plus agents obeying law which has results, and it is no function of law to govern or define the number and place of its own agents. Whether a particle of matter shall gravitate, depends not only upon the law of Newton, but also upon the distribution of surrounding particles. The theory of gravitation may perhaps be true throughout all time and in all parts of space, and the Creator may never find occasion to create those possible exceptions to it which I have asserted to be conceivable. Let this be as it may; our science cannot certainly determine the question. Certain it is, that the law of gravity does not alone determine the forces which may be brought to bear at any point of space. The force of gravitation acting upon any particle depends upon the mass, distance, and relative position of all the other particles of matter within the bounds of space at the instant in question. Even assuming that all matter when once distributed through space at the Creation was thenceforth to act in an invariable manner without subsequent interference, yet the actual configuration of matter at any moment, and the consequent results of the law of gravitation, must have been entirely a matter of free choice.

Chalmers has most distinctly pointed out that the existing collocations of the material world are as important as the laws which the objects obey. He remarks that a certain class of writers entirely overlook the distinction, and forget that mere laws without collocations would have afforded no security against a turbid and disorderly chaos.1 Mill has recognised 2 the truth of Chalmers' statement, without drawing the proper inferences from 1 First Bridgewater Treatise (1834), pp. 16-24.

2 System of Logic, 5th edit. bk. III. chap. V. § 7; chap. XVI. § 3.

He says1 of the distribution of matter through space, "We can discover nothing regular in the distribution itself; we can reduce it to no uniformity, to no law." More lately the Duke of Argyll in his well-known work on the Reign of Law has drawn attention to the profound distinction. between laws and collocations of causes.

The original conformation of the material universe, as far as we can tell, was free from all restriction. There was unlimited space in which to frame it, and an unlimited number of material particles, each of which could be placed in any one of an infinite number of different positions. It should be added, that each particle might be endowed with any one of an infinite number of quantities of vis viva acting in any one of an infinite number of different directions. The problem of Creation was, then, what a mathematician would call an indeterminate problem, and it was indeterminate in a great number of ways. Infinitely numerous and various universes might then have been fashioned by the various distribution of the original nebulous matter, although all the particles of matter should obey the law of gravity.

Lucretius tells us how in the original rain of atoms some of these little bodies diverged from the rectilinear direction, and coming into contact with other atoms gave rise to the various combinations of substances which exist. He omitted to tell us whence the atoms came, or by what force some of them were caused to diverge; but surely these omissions involve the whole question. I accept the Lucretian conception of creation when properly supplemented. Every atom which existed in any point of space must have existed there previously, or must have been created there by a previously existing Power. When placed there it must have had a definite mass and a definite energy. Now, as before remarked, an unlimited. number of atoms can be placed in unlimited space in an unlimited number of modes of distribution. Out of infinitely infinite choices which were open to the Creator, that one choice must have been made which has yielded the Universe as it now exists.

It would be a mistake, indeed, to suppose that the law

of gravity, when it holds true, is no restriction on the distribution of force. That law is a geometrical law, and it would in many cases be mathematically impossible, as far as we can see, that the force of gravity acting on one particle should be small while that on a neighbouring particle is great. We cannot conceive that even Omnipotent Power should make the angles of a triangle greater than two right angles. The primary laws of thought and the fundamental notions of the mathematical sciences do not seem to admit of error or alteration. Into the metaphysical origin and meaning of the apparent necessity attaching to such laws I have not attempted to inquire in this work, and it is not requisite for my present purpose. If the law of gravity were the only law of nature and the Creator had chosen to render all matter obedient to that law, there would doubtless be restrictions upon the effects derivable from any one distribution of matter.

Hierarchy of Natural Laws.

A further consideration presents itself. A natural law like that of gravity expresses a certain uniformity in the action of agents submitted to it, and this produces, as we have seen, certain geometrical restrictions upon the effects which those agents may produce. But there are other forces and laws besides gravity. One force may override another, and two laws may each be obeyed and may each disguise the action of the other. In the intimate constitution of matter there may be hidden springs which, while acting in accordance with their own fixed laws, may lead to sudden and unexpected changes. So at least it has been found from time to time in the past, and so there is every reason to believe it will be found in the future. To the ancients it seemed incredible that one lifeless stone could make another leap towards it. A piece of iron while it obeys the magnetic force of the loadstone does not the less obey the law of gravity. A plant gravitates downwards as regards every constituent cell or fibre, and yet it persists in growing upwards. Life is altogether an exception to the simpler phenomena of mineral substances, not in the sense of disproving those laws, but in superadding forces of new and inexplicable character. Doubtless no

law of chemistry is broken by the action of the nervous cells, and no law of physics by the pulses of the nervous fibres, but something requires to be added to our sciences. in order that we may explain these subtle phenomena.

Now there is absolutely nothing in science or in scientific method to warrant us in assigning limit to this hierarchy of laws. When in many undoubted cases we find law overriding law, and at certain points in our experience producing unexpected results, we

cannot

venture to affirm that we have exhausted the strange phenomena which may have been provided for in the original constitution of matter. The Universe might have been so designed that it should go for long intervals through the same round of unvaried existence, and yet that events of exceptional character should be produced from time to time. Babbage showed in that most profound and eloquent work, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, that it was theoretically possible for human artists to design a machine, consisting of metallic wheels and levers, which should work invariably according to a simple law of action during any finite number of steps, and yet at a fixed moment, however distant, should manifest a single breach of law. Such an engine might go on counting, for instance, the natural numbers until they would reach a number requiring for its expression a hundred million digits. "If every letter in the volume now before the reader's eyes," says Babbage, "were changed into a figure, and if all the figures contained in a thousand such volumes were arranged in order, the whole together would yet fall far short of the vast induction the observer would have had in favour of the truth of the law of natural numbers. Yet shall the engine, true to the prediction of its director, after the lapse of myriads of ages, fulfil its task, and give that one, the first and only exception to that time-sanctioned law. What would have been the chances against the appearance of the excepted case, immediately prior to its occurrence?"

1

As Babbage further showed,2 a calculating engine, after proceeding through any required number of motions. according to a first law, may be made suddenly to suffer a change, so that it shall then commence to calculate 1 Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, p. 140. 2 Ibid. pp. 34-43.

according to a wholly new law. After giving the natural numbers for a finite time, it might suddenly begin to give triangular, or square, or cube numbers, and these changes might be conceived theoretically as occurring time after time. Now if such occurrences can be designed and foreseen by a human artist, it is surely within the capacity of the Divine Artist to provide for analogous changes of law in the mechanism of the atom, or the construction of the heavens.

Physical science, so far as its highest speculations can be trusted, gives some indication of a change of law in the past history of the Universe. According to Sir W. Thomson's deductions from Fourier's Theory of Heat, we can trace down the dissipation of heat by conduction and radiation to an infinitely distant time when all things will be uniformly cold. But we cannot similarly trace the heat-history of the Universe to an infinite distance in the past. For a certain negative value of the time the formulæ give impossible values, indicating that there was some initial distribution of heat which could not have resulted, according to known laws of nature, from any previous distribution. There are other cases in which a consideration of the dissipation of energy leads to the conception of a limit to the antiquity of the present order of things. Human science, of course, is fallible, and some oversight or erroneous simplification in these theoretical calculations may afterwards be discovered; but as the present state of scientific knowledge is the only ground on which erroneous inferences from the uniformity of nature and the supposed reign of law are founded, I am right in appealing to the present state of science in opposition to these inferences. Now the theory of heat places us in the dilemma either of

2

1 Professor Clifford, in his most interesting lecture on "The First and Last Catastrophe" (Fortnightly Review, April 1875, p. 480, reprint by the Sunday Lecture Society, p. 24), objects that I have erroneously substituted "known laws of nature" for "known laws of conduction of heat." I quite admit the error, without admitting all the conclusions which Professor Clifford proceeds to draw; but I maintain the paragraph unchanged, in order that it may be discussed in the Preface.

2 Tait's Thermodynamics, p. 38. Cambridge Mathematical Journal, vol. iii. p. 174.

3 Clerk Maxwell's Theory of Heat, p. 245.