ge was
confessedly equal to that of Comte, and who in candor and accuracy was
certainly his superior. Prof. Whewell, in his "Astronomy and Physics,"
says: "This hypothesis by no means proves that the solar system was
formed without the intervention of intelligence and design. It only
transfers our view of the skill exercised and the means employed to
another part of the work; for how came the sun and its atmosphere to
have such materials, such motions, such a constitution, and these
consequences followed from their primordial condition? How came the
parent vapor thus to be capable of coherence, separation, contraction,
solidification? How came the laws of its motion, attraction, repulsion,
condensation, to be so fixed as to lead to a beautiful and harmonious
system in the end? How came it to be neither too fluid nor too
tenacious, to contract neither too quickly nor too slowly for the
successive formation of the several planetary bodies? How came that
substance, which at one time was a luminous vapor, to be at a subsequent
period solids and fluids of many various kinds? What but design and
intelligence prepared and tempered this previously-existing element, so
that it should, by its natural changes, produce such an orderly
system"?[262] "_The laws of motion alone will not produce the regularity
which we admire in the motion of the heavenly bodies_. There must be an
original adjustment of the system on which these laws are to act; a
selection of the arbitrary quantities which they are to involve; a
primitive cause which shall dispose the elements in due relation to each
other, in order that regular recurrence may accompany constant change,
and that perpetual motion may be combined with perpetual
stability."[263]

[Footnote 262: "Astronomy and Physics," p. 109.]

[Footnote 263: Chalmers's "Institutes of Theology," vol. i. p. 119.]

The harmony of the solar system in all its phenomena does not depend
upon the operation of any _one_ law, but from the special adjustment of
several laws. There are certain agents operating throughout the entire
system which have different properties, and which require special
adjustment to each other, in order to their beneficial operation. 1st.
There is _Gravitation,_ prevailing apparently through all space. But it
does not prevail alone. It is a force whose function is to balance other
forces of which we know little, except that these, again, are needed to
balance the force of gravitation