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Rh proofs of a supreme wisdom in assigning the positions, regulating the motions, etc., of the heavenly bodies have entirely collapsed. Every feature of the actual orderly universe is a direct and inevitable result of the inherent properties of the original nebula. So far was "chaos" from needing a "Logos" to direct its growth into a "cosmos"—in other words, so little did the nebula need a Designer—that it could not have evolved in any other direction: the law of gravitation determined all in advance. The word "law" is but an abstract way of regarding the action of force, and science has every reason to think that force is only matter in motion. Thus science has beaten back the "watch-maker" argument until it simply implies that matter and motion must have had a creator—in other words, teleology, as such, has vanished, or is only tacked on as an appendix to the argument for a First Cause. And, as we saw in the preceding chapter, modern philosophy, both empirical and transcendental, entirely rejects the causation argument.

Then, when we come to the great breaches in the hierarchy of being as it was conceived a century ago, we find that they have already been almost entirely filled up. Until a few centuries ago the doctrine of the spontaneous generation of living beings (from non-living) was universally admitted. Scientists proved that the supposed cases of abiogenesis were fallacious, and that in no actual case is life born from non-life. The facile and erratic mind of the theologian immediately erected this empirical statement into an a priori dogma: it is still quite common to read in sacro-scientific literature that the researches of Pasteur, etc., have proved the impossibility of the birth of life from inanimate matter. Science, it need not be said, does not lay down a priori dogmas, and in this case it furnishes ample data for the opinion that life was evolved from non-life. The perfection of the microscope has opened out fields of living things which were hitherto undreamed of. Apart from Pasteur's experiments, any scientist would now hesitate about thinking that such highly-organized creatures as the Infusoria could arise by abiogenesis—to say nothing of bees, frogs, etc. But when we come to such monocellular organisms as the Amoeba, the case is very different. Little structureless atoms of protoplasm, there is little faith