atement
that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child
ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to
divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely
akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order,
beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other
alternative--design, purpose, guidance. Professor Fiske quotes a quaint
observation of Kepler's illustrating this very point, which we may be
allowed to reproduce:--

Yesterday, when weary with writing and my mind quite dusty with
considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and a salad was set
before me. "It seems then," said I aloud, "that if pewter dishes, leaves
of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of oil and vinegar, and slices of eggs,
had been floating about in the air from all eternity, it might at last
happen by chance that there would come a salad." "Yes," says my wife,
"but not so nice and well-dressed as mine is!"

Mrs. Kepler's shrewd, homely remark gives its last touch of absurdity to
the suggestion {83} that a world which we see to be pervaded by unfailing
law has come together by sheer, incalculable accident. Not so much as a
salad of respectable calibre could be accounted for upon such a theory;
how much less credible is it that the universe began with a cosmic dance
of unconscious atoms whirled along by unconscious forces, and happening
so to combine as to produce order and sequence, life and consciousness,
will and affection!

But not only does the universe exhibit a sublime order which is the very
contrary of what we can associate with the blind workings of chance; not
only do the circling immensities of the stars and the microscopic
perfections of the snow-crystals alike point to a shaping and directing
Mind and Will: what nature reveals--what is implied in the very term
evolution--is not merely order but progress. As Fiske has it, "Whatever
else may be true, the conviction is brought home to us that in all this
endless multifariousness there is one single principle at work, that _all
is tending towards an end that was involved in the very beginning_." In
other words, the supreme certainty brought home to us by the researches
of modern science is that all creation is thrilled through by an
all-encompassing Purpose. We really ask for no more than such an
admission; that, in short, is our case. We can clinch the whole argument
with o