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12 from days of blank ignorance. The 'Nature-searchers' of to-day admit no such possibility as 'chance.' It will be in the recollection of many here, that a leading writer and investigator of the Victorian Era, the physicist John Tyndall, pointed out in a celebrated address delivered at Belfast that according to the conceptions of the mechanism of Nature arrived at by modern science—the structure of that mechanism is such that it would have been possible for a being of adequate intelligence inspecting the gaseous nebula from which our planetary system has evolved to have foreseen in that luminous vapour the Belfast audience and the professor addressing it! The fallacy that in given but unknown circumstances anything whatever may occur in spite of the fact that some one thing has been irrevocably arranged to occur, is a common one2. It is correct to assume in the absence of any pertinent knowledge (if we are compelled to estimate the probabilities) that one event is as likely as another to occur; but nevertheless there is no 'chance' in the matter since the event has been already determined, and might be predicted by those possessing the knowledge which we lack. Thus then it appears that the conclusion that Man is a part of Nature is by no means equivalent to asserting that he has originated by 'blind chance': it is in fact a specific assertion that he is the predestined outcome of an orderly—and to a large extent 'perceptible'—mechanism.

The general process by which the higher and more elaborate forms of life, and eventually man himself, have