of living
things to come up and flourish, and the gliding fires of ether
to live: all which these several things could in no wise bring
to pass, unless a store of matter could rise up from infinite
space, out of which store they are wont to make up in due
season whatever has been lost."[240:10]

The prophecy of La Place, the great French mathematician, voices the
similar faith of the eighteenth century in a mechanical understanding
of the universe:

"The human mind, in the perfection it has been able to give to
astronomy, affords a feeble outline of such an intelligence.
Its discoveries in mechanics and in geometry, joined to that
of universal gravitation, have brought it within reach of
comprehending in the same analytical expressions the past and
future states of the system of the world."[241:11]

As for God, the creative and presiding intelligence, La Place had "no
need of any such hypothesis."

[Sidenote: The Task of Naturalism.]

Sect. 110. But these are the boasts of Homeric heroes before going into
battle. The moment such a general position is assumed there arise sundry
difficulties in the application of naturalistic principles to special
interests and groups of facts. It is one thing to project a mechanical
scheme in the large, but quite another to make explicit provision within
it for the origin of nature, for life, for the human self with its
ideals, and for society with its institutions. The naturalistic method
of meeting these problems involves a reduction all along the line in the
direction of such categories as are derived from the infra-organic
world. That which is not like the planetary system must be construed as
mechanical by indirection and subtlety.

[Sidenote: The Origin of the Cosmos.]

Sect. 111. The origin of the present known natural world was the first
philosophical question to be definitely met by science. The general form
of solution which naturalism offers is anticipated in the most ancient
theories of nature. These already suppose that the observed mechanical
processes of the circular or periodic type, like the revolutions and
rotations of the stars, are incidents in a historical mechanical process
of a larger scale. Prior to the present fixed motions of the celestial
bodies, the whole mass of cosmic matter participated in irregular
motions analogous to present terrestrial redistributions. Such motions
may be understood to have