Now this I conceive to have been a fully valid argument at the time it was published, and indeed the most convincing of all the arguments in favour of Theism. But, as already so frequently pointed out, the considerations adduced in Chapter IV. of the present work are utterly destructive of this argument. For this argument assumes, rightly enough, that the only alternative we have in choosing our hypothesis concerning the final explanation of things is either to regard that explanation as Intelligence or as Fortuity. This, I say, was a legitimate argument a few months ago, because up to that time no one had shown that strictly natural causes, as distinguished from chances, could conceivably be able to produce a cosmos; and although the several previous writers to whom Professor Flint alludes--and he might have alluded to others in this connection--entertained a dim anticipation of the fact that natural causes might alone be sufficient to produce the observed universe, still these dim anticipations were worthless as _arguments_ so long as it remained impossible to suggest any natural _principle_ whereby such a result could have been conceivably effected by such causes. But it is evident that Professor Flint's time-honoured argument is now completely overthrown, unless it can be proved that there is some radical error in the reasoning whereby I have endeavoured to show that natural causes not only _may_, but _must_, have produced existing order. The overthrow is complete, because the very groundwork of the argument in question is knocked away; a third possibility, of the nature of a necessity, is introduced, and therefore the alternative is no longer between Intelligence and Fortuity, but between Intelligence and Natural Causation. Whereas the overwhelming strength of the argument from Order has hitherto consisted in the supposition of Intelligence as the one and only conceivable cause of the integration of things, my exposition in Chapter IV. has shown that such integration must have been due, at all events in a relative or proximate sense, to a strictly physical cause--the persistence of force and the consequent self-evolution of natural law. And the question as to whether or not Intelligence may not have been the absolute or ultimate cause is manifestly a question altogether alien to the argument from Order; for if existing order admits of being accounted for, in a relative or proximate sense, by merely physical causes, the argument from a relative or proximate order is not at liberty to infer or to assume the existence of any higher or more ultimate cause. Although, therefore, in Chapter V., I have been careful to point out that the fact of existing order having been due to proximate or natural causes does not actually _disprove_ the possible existence of an ultimate and supernatural cause, still it must be carefully observed that this _negative_ fact cannot possibly justify any _positive_ inference to the existence of such a cause.