The same observations apply to Professor Flint's theistic argument drawn from recent scientific speculations as to the vortex-ring construction of matter. If these speculations are sound, their only influence on Theism would be that of supplying a scientific demonstration of the substantial identity of Force and Matter, and so of supplying a still more valid basis for the theory as to the natural genesis of matter from a single primordial substance, in the manner sketched out in Chapter IV. For the argument adduced by Professor Flint, that as the manner in which the vorticial motion of a ring is originated has not as yet been suggested, therefore its origination must have been due to a "Divine impulse," is an argument which again uses the absence of knowledge as equivalent to its possession. We are in the presence of a very novel and highly abstruse theory, or rather hypothesis, in physics, which was originally suggested by, and has hitherto been mainly indebted to, empirical experiments as distinguished from mathematical calculations; and from the mere fact that, in the case of such a hypothesis, mathematicians have not as yet been able to determine the physical conditions required to originate vorticial motion, we are expected to infer that no such conditions can ever have existed, and therefore that every such vortex system, if it exists, is a miracle! And substantially the same criticism applies to the argument which Professor Flint adduces--the argument also on which Professors Balfour and Tait lay so much stress in their work on the _Unseen Universe_--the argument, namely, as to the non-eternal character of heat. The calculations on which this argument depends would only be valid as sustaining this argument if they were based upon a knowledge of the universe _as a whole_; and therefore, as before, the absence of requisite knowledge must not be used as equivalent to its possession. These, however, are the weakest parts of Professor Flint's work. I therefore gladly turn to those parts which are exceedingly cogent as written from his standpoint, but which, in view of the strictures on the teleological argument that I have adduced in Chapters IV. and VI., I submit to be now wholly valueless.