Next, the necessitarian argument lays it down that the marvel of evolution vanishes when we reflect that if things had been different at the beginning, the results would have been different. But they were not. And the fact that they were not is just the marvel which the necessitarian does not even explain away: in order to diminish the probability of purpose, he postulates countless possible alternatives to the original arrangement of atoms, and then he is embarrassed with the difficulty of getting rid of them. Why was this particular collocation determined on rather than one of the countless alternatives? To say it was chance may be true; but we want to know what reason there is for believing it to be true. If there is none, then neither is there any reason for believing the purpose that makes the evolution process to be an illusion. But let us grant it was chance: chance, as everyone knows, is merely a name for our ignorance as to the real cause; so that to say it was due to chance is to say that, for anything we know to the contrary, the original concurrence of atoms may have been due to purpose. In a word, there is, on the theory of chance, no reason to believe that purpose either is or is not an illusion. It may, however, be said that not only do we not know, but that we cannot know, whether it is an illusion or not. In reply we may either admit that all our knowledge--scientific, moral, and religious--is based not on knowledge, but on faith; or we may ask on what grounds this alleged impossibility is based. If we put that question, we shall find that the grounds are not altogether cogent. It is alleged to be equally impossible for the human mind to conceive either the existence or the non-existence of a necessity antecedent to the absolute beginning of things: therefore, in face of this inherent incapacity of the human mind, the truth about the beginning of things is unknowable and inconceivable. But, we venture to suggest, this alleged incapacity of the human mind rests on a false antithesis: it rests on the assumption that whatever phase of the evolution process we regard as the initial arrangement must either have been determined by some prior phase (in which case it was not initial) or not determined at all. But as a mere matter of logic, there remains the possibility that it may have been self-determined; and, as regards the evidence of experience, we are familiar with a cause which operates every day and which is self-determined, viz. the free will. There is, therefore, no such inherent incapacity in the human mind as is alleged; and the only inconceivability is that which is inherent in the theory of antecedent necessity, and not in the facts themselves. It is simply incorrect to say that if things cannot be explained by the theory of antecedent necessity, they are not capable of being explained at all. If the evolution process had been designed to follow the course it has