"'You cannot prove that force (which physicists define as that which causes motion) would invariably thus change its character under the above conditions. Again, I maintain that matter, though it may be in the future eternal, was created by God with the most marvellous affinities, leading to {43} complex definite compounds, and with polarities leading to beautiful crystals, etc., etc. You cannot prove that matter would necessarily possess these attributes. Therefore you have no right to say that you have "demonstrated" that all natural laws necessarily follow from gravity, the persistence of force, and existence of matter. If you say that nebulous matter existed aboriginally and from eternity, with all its present complex powers in a potential state, you seem to me to beg the whole question.' "Please observe it is not I, but a theologian, who has thus addressed you, but I could not answer him."[10] The alternatives to Design, _i.e._, to the recognition of directive activity, would be Necessity or Chance. From both of these the deepest instincts of humanity--which in such matters are as fully to be relied on as its logical faculty--strongly recoil. No one has spoken out more strongly about the first than Huxley did. "What is the dire necessity and 'iron' law under which you groan?" he asks. "Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears. I suppose if there be an 'iron' law, it is that of gravitation; and if {44} there be a physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground.... But when, as commonly happens, we change _will_ into _must_, we introduce an idea of necessity which most assuredly does not lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover. For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematise the intruder.... The notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate conception of law; the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas."[11] But a dogma of Necessity would be more tolerable than a doctrine of Chance. In Lord Kelvin's address, to which reference has been made, he declared his conviction that "directive power" was "an article of belief which science compelled him to accept." There was nothing, he said, between such a belief and the acceptance of the theory of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. And, in a letter to the _Times_ justifying this assertion, he told how forty years before he had asked Liebig, when walking with him in the country, whether he believed that the grass {45} and flowers they saw around them "grew by mere chemical forces." "No," he answered, "no more than I could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow by mere chemical forces."