Now, in the list of the mathematical _elements_ of the universe which has just been given, why have we such laws and such quantities as there occur, and no other? For the most part, the data there enumerated are independent of each other, and might be altered separately, so far as the mechanical conditions of the case are concerned. Some of these data probably depend on each other. Thus the latent heat of aqueous vapour is perhaps connected with the difference of the rate of expansion of water and of steam. But all natural philosophers will, probably, agree, that there must be, in this list, a great number of things entirely without any mutual dependence, as the year and the day, the expansion of air and the expansion of steam. There are, therefore, it appears, a number of things which, in the structure of the world, might have been otherwise, and which are what they are in consequence of choice or of chance. We have already seen, in many of the cases separately, how unlike chance every thing looks:--that substances, which might have existed any how, so far as they themselves are concerned, exist exactly in such a manner and measure as they should, to secure the welfare of other things:--that the laws are tempered and fitted together in the only way in which the world could have gone on, according to all that we can conceive of it. This must, therefore, be the work of choice; and if so, it cannot be doubted, of a most wise and benevolent Chooser. 3. The appearance of choice is still further illustrated by the variety as well as the number of the laws selected. The laws are unlike one another. Steam certainly expands at a very different _rate_ from air by the application of heat, probably according to a different _law_: water expands in freezing, but mercury contracts: heat travels in a manner quite different through solids and fluids. Every separate substance has its own density, gravity, cohesion, elasticity, its relations to heat, to electricity, to magnetism; besides all its chemical affinities, which form an endless throng of laws, connecting every one substance in creation with every other, and different for each pair anyhow taken. Nothing can look less like a world formed of atoms operating upon each other according to some universal and inevitable laws, than this does: if such a system of things be conceivable, it cannot be our system. We have, it may be, fifty simple substances in the world; each of which is invested with properties, both of chemical and mechanical action, altogether different from those of any other substance. Every portion, however minute, of any of these, possesses all the properties of the substance. Of each of these substances there is a certain unalterable quantity in the universe; when combined, their compounds exhibit new chemical affinities, new mechanical laws. Who gave these different laws to the different substances? who proportioned the quantity of each? But suppose this done.